


Land on Your Feet

by Cards_Slash



Series: Land on Your Feet - series [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Canon-Typical Violence, Desmond is actually an Assassin, M/M, Revenge, Technically High School
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-14 16:28:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 76,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1273276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malik hates everything about this future that he has woken up in.  He hates the noise of it, he hates the smell of it, he hates the buzz of electronics, he hates the violence of firearms.  He hates the woman that found him, that strapped him into an Animus and killed the person he had been to replace that boy with a man that should have stayed dead.  He hates Italian food, and Italy and the Mentor of the Italian Brotherhood that hated him.</p><p>He thought he had reached a plateau in hatred.  That was before he found himself transported to America, standing in front of a man who talked too fast to understand, who gave him a photograph and informed him that he would be retrieving another victim for the Reincarnation Protocol.  And things only get worse from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

For a moment, if only for that short span of time between action-and-reaction, Arlo Moretti’s face was frozen in a mask of absolute hatred. His aged face was heavy with creases and lines that were deepest around his narrow eyes. The thick-and-graying beard around his mouth did nothing to hide the contemptuous scowl, and his voice was thick in his throat where the words he’d meant to say were stuck on the sharp end of the hidden blade. His hands—quicker to react than his face—had caught in the slick, dark jacket Malik wore. One of his fists had managed to grip his arm above the elbow but the other had slipped away just as his face started to loosen up. There was no blood (not yet) but a dawning sort of awareness around his eyes that loosened up the anger. His lips, no longer twisted into a frown, mouthed at sounds Malik couldn’t understand.

But he seemed to understand as he loosened his hand on Malik’s arm, that his life had come to end. There was a panic in his face as Malik pulled his arm back, as he felt the blade moving back. Maybe it was pain that made his mouth open in a soundless kind of scream, or maybe it was a primal sort of fear. The blood came when the blade started to slide free and there was nothing to hold it at bay. It came in a fount—fresh and dark and fast—and Malik stepped back to let Arlo Moretti fall to the floor in a graceless heap. His hands were scratching at the thickness of the rug spread across the space in front of his desk, his feet uselessly digging for purchase as his blood spread in a puddle beneath his body.

Malik stepped out of the way of it but stood guard over this man’s death until his body had relented at last and gone still. His breath no longer rattled loosely through the gaping hole in his throat and his legs had ceased their twitching—and then, only then, did he crouch low enough to reach across the puddle of blood and close the man’s eyes. He whispered, ‘rest in peace’ in the darkness of the library where nobody but the corpse could hear it. 

Then he stood up, wiped the blade across the back of the plush arm chair on his way toward the door. There were two more bodies lying in heaps, one with a broken neck and the other with Malik’s second favorite knife sticking out of his chest. He stopped long enough to pry the knife out of the man’s ribcage and wiped it as best as he could on the man’s clothes before he tucked it back into its place. He went through the half-open door without touching it and dug into the pocket on his jacket for the ear piece that he’d taken out. 

These people of the future (or present, really, the here-and-now) were terrible with impatience and spoiled by technology. The earpiece itself made it difficult to be still and concentrate, made it hard for Malik to be silent in step and breath. But the job was complete now, the target was lying dead on the floor at the end of the hallway. He slipped the earpiece back into place and heard the rapid-popping of gunfire through it, the way Abbas was shouting for back-up, cursing his name again and again.

Then there was Shaun, in an aggravated huff saying, “he’s not answering. I’ve tried everything, he should be answering.” Shaun was miles away from them, listening to the firefight on a headset while he stared at his computer schematic and tried to figure out the best route of escape or infiltration. “Can you move?”

“I’m pinned down!” Abbas screamed at him. His voice had a clear-high quality to it, like a wounded animal growling at an approaching threat. “No I can’t move you ignorant little fuck.”

Malik took his time in the hallway, slipping easily through the empty building. There was nobody this far into the building, they had all run out toward the gunfight that Abbas started when he shot the first two men they came across. He had been cocky and self-assured forty minutes ago when he stood over their bodies with his gun pointed down at their prone bodies. The leer of his smile had been garish and crude like the way he killed. In another lifetime, Malik might have told him how stupid he was, how he had damned them both with his foolishness—but things were different in the here-and-now where he found himself. 

The hall came to a crossroads and Malik took the short hall to the left that lead to the kitchen. There was nobody here, not even the sign that anyone had made time to bother with dinner before Abbas and he had arrived. The plates and cups were still stacked by the sink with a dish towel folded next to them. A single spoon sat in the sink next to an empty coffee cup. Malik could hear the gunfire at the front of the building through the small window over the sink.

“Malik,” Shaun was saying, “where the hell are you? I tried to fucking tell them but they didn’t listen. Don’t you dare do something stupid! I hope you’re listening to me because I know what you’re thinking and I’m telling you it’s a no go.” His words were a long slur of English, almost too quick for Malik to make out. The men that brought him back (reincarnated him, they said) told him that he would always have trouble with languages, that it was normal, that he shouldn’t worry about it too much. “Don’t kill Abbas,” is what Shaun said in Arabic, over and over again. 

The sound of the firefight had gotten muffled through the earpiece; Shaun must have turned it down after he closed off the line to Abbas. He might have been frantically whispering into the mike back at his little cubby in the safe house, body bent over and head against the edge of the desk the way he sometimes did when he was too angry-and-worried to think properly. 

Malik considered the advice. He thought it through carefully as he sorted through the fridge, picking through condiments and drinks looking for anything at all that looked like food. There was no wonder the kitchen was so impeccable when there were no ingredients for a meal in the fridge. 

Abbas screamed into his headset—long and low and piercing. “Malik! Damn it!” 

Malik found the side door that led into an empty part of the yard and turned around to look up at the house. There were no decent hand-holds to climb, but there was a tree a few yards away that stood as tall as the roof. He walked down to it—farther and farther away from the sound of gunfire—and caught the lowest branch. It was an easy climb, and an easy jump to the rooftop. He stayed low and close to the roof as he worked his way forward.

There were two men standing near the front of the house with automatic rifles, both of them facing away from him as they kept Abbas pinned in place. The noise of the guns made his teeth hurt, and turned his stomach over. (There was too much noise in the present, too much sound to bear.) Malik moved on silent-feet, drew two knives from the thin-tight sheathes across his thigh. The men didn’t even hear him before he was close enough to drive his knives through the thick, rough cloth of their uniforms down into their hearts. He caught their collars to pull them back onto the roof when their bodies went to slump forward and fall to the ground. 

“Shaun,” Malik said. He put his knives away and picked up one of the rifles. It was hot and strange in his hands. The Mentor of the Italian Assassin’s had made it clear to him that he was expected to know how to use firearms and be proficient at it. He’d done so only to secure the use of his preferred weapons. When he spoke again he made sure to speak slowly-and-clearly, trying hard to remember how to pronounce the Arabic words the way Shaun understood best. “I think you understand why I cannot do what you asked.” It was easy to pick off the few guards left alive on the ground from so high in the air. 

Then there was glorious silence, save for Abbas’ wounded moaning through the earpiece. Malik set the rifle down and slid down the roof toward the gutter. It was a steep fall from the gutters to the ground, the impact of landing jarred his body and made his jaw snap shut hard enough he bit his cheek.

“He’s part of the Brotherhood, Malik. Listen to me, you cannot kill Abbas.” Shaun was talking to fast now, spewing a litany of sounds that might have made words any other time. 

Malik found a heavy handgun tucked away in the holster of one of the guards. He liked the weight of it, liked the feel of it as he checked it for bullets. Satisfied he had enough, he walked toward the sound of Abbas cursing in pain. The car he’d fallen behind was riddled with bullet holes, dripping blood from the body of the guard that had been trapped inside it. 

Abbas was slumped against it, bleeding from a wound in his shoulder too far removed from his heart to be fatal. There was another in his arm and another in his thigh that was oozing deep-red blood in intermittent gushes. Given enough time, Abbas would have bled out on his own and Malik considered that as he stood at the rear bumper of the car and watched the man struggling to breathe.

But Abbas still smiled at him—bloody, pale and dripping sweat— “They will burn you for this,” he said.

Malik stepped closer, careful to keep out of the puddle of blood. He looked down at Abbas, at the conceited lightness of his clothes, at the litter of bullets and guns on the ground around him. He even pointed one at Malik and pulled the trigger to have nothing happen save for a damning click. “I’ll take my chances,” Malik said.

Abbas rolled his head back to look at him. “This must be a great day for you.”

“I had hoped the circumstances would be different, but I think there’s a sort of symmetry in the way this worked out. Altair killed you once this way, didn’t he? It won’t be as shocking this time, will it?” In this modern-time, guns were commonplace. 

Abbas opened his mouth to say something, to taunt him again, and Malik shot him twice in the heart before he could utter a sound. The sharp report of the gun made Shaun howl in his ear and start babbling again but Abbas slumped lifeless and silent to the ground. Malik let the gun fall and stepped close enough to say, “rest in peace. Stay dead this time.” 

“Malik,” Shaun said from somewhere very far away. He said nothing else, but sat in stunned silence.

\--

Abbas had insisted on taking a car the way he’d insisted on using guns and insisted on climbing in through the easiest route possible landing them directly in the sight of several guards. Malik traced their path back to where the car had been left and broke one of the windows with the hilt of a knife. There was a map under the passenger seat that Abbas had immediately scoffed at (called it a waste of time) before he threw it carelessly to the side. The scrawl of letters across it made his head hurt (trouble with languages, they said) but he tucked it into his pocket and kept walking toward the lights at the end of the street.

\--

Malik washed his face in a fountain, rinsed his bloody knives before he pulled his bloody jacket off and dropped it into the water. It floated with bloated little bubbles until he found a piece of stone large enough to weigh it down. (His mind was thick with forensic countermeasures that meant nothing to him, bits-and-pieces of things that he’d heard but couldn’t understand.) His arms were spotted and streaked with blood so he undid the straps of the hidden blade and set it on the ground. His left arm was crusty with blood and ringed with pink-and-red pressure marks from the blade. Everything was getting gray again, he could feel his mind losing focus and the way his heart sped up in his chest in panic. 

The water was cold when he pushed his left arm into it up to the elbow. The bottom of the fountain was smooth when he touched it and his fingers were real-and-whole when he spread then under the water and then clenched them. 

“Stay conscious,” he mumbled to himself. So he started scrubbing at his arms until they were irritated and pink but free of blood. Then he slipped his knives and the cumbersome hidden blade into the wide pockets on the side of his pants. Without his jacket to cover the mechanism it’s was useless as a stealth weapon.

“What was your plan?” Shaun asked through the earpiece. He had kept perfect silence for so long that the sound of his voice was akin to being punched in the ear. His voice was heavy-and-weary. “They’ll find you if you run.”

Malik pushed his hands into the pockets of his pants and started walking toward the lights. There were people where there were lights, and where there were people there were clothes-and-money. The wind was an unforgiving howl around him, dragging the wet-and-cold air all along his body, sneaking underneath the light fabric of his shirt. “I am going to steal someone’s wallet and then I am going to find something to eat.” 

“Rosario is going to eat you alive,” Shaun said. He might have been a perfect linguist in this modern age where so much had changed but his grasp of Arabic was clumsy and strange to Malik. It helped that he even tried while the others continued on in their own languages, shouting at him with words he couldn’t understand and then responding with anger when he didn’t obey. “She founded the whole Reincarnation Protocol on Abbas. He was her poster child, and by all rights, the only thing that kept her seat as the Mentor of the Italian Brotherhood and you just put two bullets in him.”

“Considerably more merciful than beheading,” Malik said. (But his head hurt, with all these sounds in his ear.) His shoulders were hunched forward from the cold. His body was not always the one he remembered, still reed-thin in its youth when he remembered the heaviness of age settling itself on his bones. There was nothing to shield him from the bitter cold of the wind as he walked on.

“Oh, be sure to mention that to her, won’t you? Especially since there aren’t already enough detractors that cite ReCarns inability to move beyond their previous lives as a good enough reason to shut down the Protocol.” Shaun slapped something down miles away but the sound echoed through the ear piece as clear as anything. 

“Have you ever been betrayed, Shaun? Have you ever had everything you worked for, everything you’ve devoted yourself to torn away from you? Have you sat in darkness, starving and filthy for _years_ to think of every moment that lead to your betrayal? When you have lost everything—your family, your home, your beliefs and your dignity, when you have had the last shred of hope torn away from you then you may lecture me.” 

The evening was too cold for people to be wasting much time out in the open, the few spare people that were rushing to get into the cover of buildings were clutching tight at their jackets as they dashed forward. Malik stood at the edge of the light and watched them rushing too-and-from, blinking back a wash of tears as his headache tightened. 

“He wasn’t the same man,” Shaun said, uselessly.

Malik snorted at the idea. “Isn’t that why we were brought back? To be the men that we were?” But the pain in his head was blinding, sound-and-sight were slipping away in the blackened void of unconsciousness. His knees gave out and he landed hard on his side on the hard ground. He was grasping at something—trying to catch the light that was funneling away from him. “Shaun,” was all he managed to say before the darkness swallowed him.

\--

Nine months ago, there had been no Malik but a boy named Amir. He had been seventeen then—full of his intentions of the future, of his fleeting but profound love for a brilliant girl with sweet-smelling dark curls that his family quietly disapproved of. His mother had frowned at him with a great severity and his father had been only ever so slightly more understanding that Amir might have wanted to chase after a white woman. All of his concerns had been simple and earthly, all of his joys had been confined in the small and ignorant scope of his life. 

Amir had known nothing of Templars or of Assassins. By all accounts, he might have been an idiot. He had been the one to stop outside of the tube station, to be distracted by the woman that had shouted ‘Malik’. Amir had been the one that turned around to look at her when the rest of the people surged onward toward their destinations—and at the time, Amir had not even understood why he turned back.

His confusion didn’t matter, the woman had simply smiled at him. Then there was a hand at his back and something like a pinch on the side of his neck before the world began to fade out around him. His body had gone instantly limp, and the woman had come closer-closer, her smile sliding out of place as her hand touched him and her lips moved in words he couldn’t make out.

Amir had been the one that woke up in a small, white room wearing nothing. He had been the one that curled up against the far wall, shivering from the coolness of the room and blushing brilliant red from embarrassment. It had been Amir that took the clothes left in the center of the room. It had been Amir that ate the food they left and drank the water. Amir who put himself in the corner when the woman came to find him.

She said, ‘I assure you that you will be treated with the utmost care, Malik.’ 

Amir had said, ‘that’s not my name. You have the wrong person. I won’t tell anyone.’

But the woman with the blonde hair and the shark-sharp blue eyes had only smiled at him as the men who worked for her dragged him out. They strapped him into a machine they called an Animus, they told him things about ‘reincarnation’ while Amir shouted at their insanity and thrashed against the restraints. It was Amir’s struggle that burnt bruises and laced cuts across Malik’s body.

It was Amir’s heart that stopped, Amir’s lungs that seized, Amir’s brain that filled with fluid as it was pumped full of the memories. It was Amir that laid in the hospital room in a daze, mumbling broken pleas for his life. 

Amir died on the hard-flat Animus that drained all of the boy he was (and the man he might have been) away and filled the body from foot to head with the memories of the man that Malik had once been.

\--

Malik woke up in a holding cell. The Assassins were too transient to have a permanent place to be—their safe houses were recently renovated spaces tucked between legitimate businesses. They hid out in ruins and in the ground and now-and-again in burnt out shells where buildings had once been. This room was part of a run-down motel with a blinking ‘no vacancy’ light standing in sharp relief against the constantly empty lot. His cell was nothing but a room with a barred window and two guards standing on the other side of the door. It had been stripped of everything save for the bed and a slip of paper with two pills on it lying on the floor. 

The pain in his head was a distant and foggy gray feeling that made his body hard to move and left his left arm feeling leaden and unreal against his body. The light was like daggers stabbing into his skull as he reached for the pills and pushed them into his mouth. He swallowed them dry and lay with his arm across his eyes until the pain abated again. 

\--

Time passed in a slow-crawl in captivity. There was an endless nothing made out of hours and days where nothing happened save for the mundane details of living. Food came, was chewed and digested. He bathed, and slept and waited. With the headache gone again, there was nothing to pass the time but the dull sludge of the strange-new world around him.

When he asked for a pencil, the guards gave him three pieces of chalk. It wasn’t the same, of course, but chalk was much less likely to be fashioned into the sort of weapon that a pencil might have been. He didn’t like the dustiness of the chalk or the unreliability of its lines. It was better than nothing at all. The walls of his ‘cell’ were a dirty kind of blue, covered with a thick wall paper that peeled up where it overlapped. 

“Jerusalem?” was Shaun’s guess when he came at last. He was a beaten dog in a V-neck sweater and thin metal-rimmed glasses. His shoulders were slumped and all around his eyes were blackened from lack of sleep. These people of the future were full of modern morality but no less efficient in their methods of torture. 

Malik said nothing, sat with his bare back pressed against the foot of the bed and his legs crossed in front of him. The last stubs of chalk were lying at his right side as he stared up at the map he’d made. It stood as tall as he could reach, spread the whole length of the wall. He’d drawn it the same as he drew it on the walls of the dungeon in Masyaf. 

“They want to know if you have anything to say in your defense.” Shaun lingered in indecision between the door and the foot of the bed where Malik sat. He was from the modern world, full of his need to fidget and shift, possessed of such great impatience. There were guards at the door watching them—novices from what Malik could tell—but armed with guns that meant to lay his corpse flat on the floor. 

“I would like more chalk,” Malik said. 

Shaun moved then, away from the guards, toward him. His body was ragged with hurt and fatigue as he crouched by him—his clothes smelled like stale sweat and dry blood. There was a red crust at the corner of his lips when he looked straight at Malik. (They had hit him, of course. They had to be sure of the truth.) “You must have something to say in your own defense.”

“Chalk please,” Malik repeated. 

\--

He was not given more chalk, or food. For two days he did little but sleep, drink water from the dirty sink in the bathroom, and sit quietly looking at the world he remembered best. Things faded-in-and-out again as he looked at it. Memories overlapped reality until he found himself as an idiot novice with an idiot novice’s blind trust in things greater than himself.

Malik hadn’t been impressive as a young man (not really) then any more than he was now. He had been harried and harassed by the restraints his responsibilities put on him. There was Kadar to think of (always, constantly, every second-of-every-day) that tempered his every stupid impulse. 

When Altair came—as he always did—he was not a child but an old man. His youth had been grayed and weighed down by the world and the truths he’d found in it. When he knelt in front of Malik as a specter, it was only his eyes that still held the same vibrancy. His mouth was moving but the sound of his voice was lost-long-ago. 

But phantoms had dogged Malik for years, they played tricks on him in the darkness of captivity, so he looked through Altair, at the wall—at the map. He said nothing and saw nothing and did nothing.

\--

The guards took him when they were sure that starvation had weakened him. He was escorted but not carried through the ugly-narrow hallways of the hotel, down the steps that were cracked and breaking, and out again into the section of the hotel reserved for the sick-and-wounded. 

Malik was delivered, with little fanfare, to the little bald doctor and his viciously unhappy nurse. Neither of them spoke Arabic, but some combination of Italian and English that came out garbled and mangled sounding to him. They were ‘collecting data’ Shaun had explained to him, about the Protocol and what it did to the human body. 

For now the bald doctor looked up at him and grimaced, motioned at the black-topped table they expected him to sit on. Malik stood at the end of it, rested his hands in his pockets and watched them. The nurse stared at him with no attempt to hide the depths of her disgust at his existence and the doctor sat hunched-back, leaning forward into the sheaths of paper that held all the information they’d collected about him. The letters were scrawls of black that made his vision swim in-and-out when he’d tried to look. 

Shaun came, eventually, arrived in fresh clothes with his hair still damp and sticking to his head. The darkness under his eyes had gotten darker but the injured, limping way he’d held himself earlier was not so pronounced. He apologized to the doctor first and then took a neutral place between the doctor and Malik. 

“They want you to take off your shirt and pants,” Shaun said. 

Malik stripped down to his underwear, dropped the clothes on the table and spread his arms the way they always asked him to do. Then they were all around him, staring at his skin, peeking in the hollows under his arms, examining the muscles of his thighs. They measured him everywhere they could get the tape around and left little black marks on his skin to remember where to measure the next time. 

“He says that you’re gaining muscle faster than average,” Shaun said. Then he turned his attention to the doctor when he spoke. Shaun asked questions and waited for the answers, nodded his head to show he’d heard and then cleared his throat and said: “he wants to know if you have any questions. He asked about the headaches.”

Malik said nothing. Shaun frowned at him for being difficult (perhaps) and translated Malik’s silence into words for the doctor. When they were dismissed, Malik dressed himself again and waited for the guards to guide him out of the room.

“Rosario wants to see you,” Shaun said. He was white-with-fear when he said it. “She doesn’t want me there.” He stopped and pulled at Malik’s arm, looked beaten and hurt and more repentant than Malik might have thought he was capable of a month ago. “I do understand.” 

Malik nodded and let the guards with their angry words pull him forward.

\--

Rosario was the Mentor of the Italian Brotherhood of Assassins. Before she was named Mentor she had been a Master Assassin, dispatched throughout the whole of Europe to seek out and eliminate Templars and their puppets. There were whispers stuck in the cracks of the Brotherhood about her efficiency with a knife. It had been a gun that ended her career that sent her back to the dusty alcoves of academia and left her there to rot until time wasted her away. If she had not discovered the possibility of reincarnation she would have been forgotten, and if she had not proved herself correct, she would have stayed forever an honorary Grandmaster tucked away behind a pile of books.

Perhaps Malik would have felt a kinship toward the person she had been not so very long ago. 

Now she stood at the end of a short room, resplendent in robes, taller than any woman Malik had ever seen in the whole of his (two) lives. The naked bulb in the center of the room cast unforgiving white light in a broad circle that washed up across the dirty foot of the wall. It smelled of stale smoke and fresh rubbing alcohol in the room.

“You may leave,” Rosario said to the guards that delivered him. She waited for them to be gone, didn’t flinch or shift on her feet but kept herself still. Her face was pinked with rage, her breath tight with hatred, but her body was still-as-a-statue.

Malik rested his weight in a defensive posture, thought carefully about where he could absorb the most injury and still have a chance to fight back. There was no doubt of her carrying weapons concealed in her robe, only the doubt of whether she intended to use them. He did not address her, did not show her the respect her title afforded her.

“You have taken something from me,” Rosario said. Her English was heavily-accented but clear enough to be understood. He had heard her rage in Italian before, watched the fluidity of her anger as it spilled out of the hinge of her square jaw. The rage of her wooden English was stilted and stale in comparison.

“I did little but expedite the process. Abbas was dead when I found him.” 

“Did you enjoy being beheaded?” Rosario asked him. 

Panic filled the spaces between his ribs, clenched at the muscles he was working so very hard to keep lose. He had seen the look in the eyes of enough men to know what his face must have looked like to her. “No,” he said when he thought his voice might not waver. 

“Do you know why we founded the Protocol?” Rosario moved then, took a step to the left with a lazy arrogance in her smile. She had found his weakness, had seen him shake before her and now in her graciousness, she meant to offer him a lesson. “We are losing. The Templars are greater in number. They hold sway over an unknowing world—they act freely and without fear of retribution, easily subduing the masses. The days of bloodshed and outright warfare have passed. These days we are a myth and only that. Our young leave our Brotherhood to live a life of ease under the Templar rule.”

Here she paused in her words but not in step. She was turning a circle around him, watching as he shifted his body to be sure to keep her in front of him. There were knives in a belt across her waist that she toyed with as she walked, shifting one loose in its sheath and then straightening it again. 

“You are the past and the future of our Brotherhood,” she said. “Not you, of course. You’re nothing but a mule that can’t be taught to mind. Men like Abbas that were swift and likeable and _obedient_ are our future.” There again the knife in her hand that she fingered with such devotion as she kept walking around him. “Abbas was strong. The men looked up to him, they asked him questions about the life he’d led, they learned the value of loyalty from him.”

Her footstep missed a pace when she spoke and she stopped a few sort feet from where she’d started. The knife in her hand was clenched between two of her fingers as her thumb ran across the sharpened tip of it. Malik shifted his weight again, waited for the glint of the knife as it came toward him.

“There will be blood for this,” she said.

“I have spilt all the blood I intend to over such a worthless man,” Malik told her. (Perhaps he liked the way the words hit her like a physical blow, perhaps he preferred not to wait for her retribution.) 

He was only just barely able to knock away the knife that was intended for his throat and stepped to the side before she could aim another at him. This body was young-and-quick when it moved, but she had seen his fear. She threw another two knives at him in the closed space that he dodged away from but she caught him when he went exactly where she meant for him to go. His back hit the wall with a thud that echoed in the emptiness of the room and made his vision spot black-and-pink. Her hand was on around the base of his throat and the sharp edge of a long blade was pressed against the skin of his neck. 

“I would not lose a moment of sleep over you,” she hissed at him. Her lips were bloody-red and her eyes were pink-rimmed as they stared at him. There was a quake in her voice but a remorseless violence in her body.

Malik went limp long enough for her to loosen the intensity of her hold and then reached up to shove her sword hand away from his throat at the same time he knocked the other away. He ducked out of her hold, slipped up into the space behind her body and kicked the back of her knee. It was the weak leg. She went down hard, hit her head against the wall hard enough she shrieked in pain. He brought his knee up into her back, grabbed her right arm to pull it down over his thigh hard enough to force her hand to drop the sword but not so hard as to break it. 

She was on her knees, heaving for breath with blood seeping out of her forehead and drooling out of her open mouth. He picked up her sword and moved back away from her, put his back to one of the solid walls and waited for the guards to come. But she pushed herself back up, leaned heaving on her good leg and wiped the blood off her face. Once-upon-a-time pain had become meaningless for her but years at a desk, stuck behind a stack of books had given her body time to relearn the pleasant nothingness of living without violence. 

“How far would you make it?” she asked.

“I have made it far through a sea of men worth more than your worthless novices,” he said, “and that was when I had but one arm.”

Rosario considered it, rested her weight lazily against the wall and used an edge of her white robe to wipe at the blood on her mouth. “History did not bother to make note of your accomplishments,” she said. Her tone was light-as-a-bird in flight. “You were always a means to an end. Then and now,” she said. Her fist rapped against the wall and men with guns came through the door, each of them pointed at his heart while the blind little novices waited for her order. “I would have your head hanging in the middle of town,” she said. “But you have not yet served your purpose.” 

She limped across the room to him, put her hand around his over the hilt of her sword and smiled at him. There was no fear in her face and he would have loved nothing so much as he would have loved to cut her open from throat to navel just to see what her face looked like when she realized how powerful she was not. “Go now,” she said to him, “like a good boy.”

\--

Malik had pride but his body had vital needs. The Italian Brotherhood accompanied him so far as the plane he was meant to ride across the great-wide ocean to somewhere in America where some unknown Brotherhood had use for him. They had guarded him for a day after his assault on Rosario, when they came to fetch him they had shoved and pushed and kicked at him. He bore it in silence not out of some inner sense of peace or moral superiority but out of the weakness of starvation. They knew he couldn’t fight back when they hit him. 

“Was there anyone you haven’t pissed off?” Shaun asked him when they were on the plane. He had stopped along the way to buy a bottle of water and something in a flimsy plastic wrapper at one of the shops by the gate. He was fiddling with his belt buckle, shifting uncomfortably in the tiny seat as he tried to keep his precious laptop from harm. 

The food was in his lap, and Malik took it because his stomach felt collapsed and his whole body was going gray. It was something processed-and-terrible and it wouldn’t have mattered because he didn’t _taste_ it as he shoved it into his mouth so quickly he may have torn off a piece of plastic and ate it as well. Oh-and-his-stomach was in furious knots of pain when the food slid into place. 

Shaun looked at him with wide-open eyes and one hand in the air as if he’d meant to take his food back. There was some white-edged realization dawning on his face that bled all the blood from his face and left him even more pale and strange than he had been a moment before. He leaned forward to dig a little bag of trail mix out of his laptop bag and handed it to him with the bottle of water. “I didn’t know,” was what he said.

Pity was useless, but Malik took his food anyway and the water. 

\--

“Right, so,” Shaun said. They were half-way through the flight with an obnoxious number of people all around them. Shaun was talking quietly, speaking slowly and carefully in English as he leaned in just slightly toward Malik. “I do understand. I know you think very little of me but I’m a rather talented historian. I didn’t know the man personally but I believe that Abbas would have eventually turned against the Brotherhood.”

Malik was trying very hard to calm his body as it revolted against food, the smell of so many people and the unnatural way they were suspended so high above the ground. “It is done,” was all he said.

\--

They arrived, with little fanfare, in America and were permitted entrance to the country using the papers that the Brotherhood provided. Shaun met him out on the noisy floor of the airport where people were rushing one-way-and-another and all at once getting nowhere. The noise-of-it and the brightness of the lights-and-signs all around him made his eyes start to hurt. Shaun was intelligent enough not to touch him but kept calling his name as if he thought Malik were incapable of following on his own.

He might have been more insulted if not for how hard it was to think through the gathering darkness of the headache crushing his temples. They stood in front of the luggage claim while Shaun waited for their bags and Malik stumbled back to the seats to collapse into them. There were two little white pills in the pocket of his jacket sewn into the lining. He dug them out with his fingernails and pushed them into his mouth. They were bitter-and-chalky, scraping their way down his throat as he pressed his thumbs against his eyes and prayed for a mercifully short death.

_Stay conscious_.

Shaun fell into place next to him with a noisy thud and leaned in toward his body in a way that was surely accidental. The heat and smell of him was as noxious as sewer gas and for one terrible moment, Malik was sure he was going to vomit all over himself. It was mindless reaction when he shoved Shaun away from him and sent him nearly tumbling forward to the ground. The man only barely caught himself with a quiet expletive. 

_Stay conscious_.

But it would have been so much nicer to slip into the blackness where it was cool and silent.

\--

The American Brotherhood, as Shaun explained to him as he drove them away from the airport, was actually a series of small groups of Assassins that were only very loosely bound together into a cohesive whole. There was no single leader, but several of them that had gained rank through good PR (as Shaun said) among the Assassin’s and actual skill. He might have gone on indefinitely but they stopped alongside the road to ditch the rented car attached to their (very fake) names. 

It was cold out in the open on the side of the highway. The sky had gone flatly black and starless above their heads. Malik found himself staring up at it, at the nothing of it, trying to remember if he had ever seen a sky that bore such ominous tidings. The stars had always been hanging over his head when he was alive the first time, he had memorized their places and counted on their familiar light when he found himself lost. 

Here he stood on soil that hadn’t even existed when he died (the first time) and there wasn’t so much as the shadow of a twinkle to comfort him. Shaun slapped him in the back and handed him his bag. There was another electronic box in his hand with a green screen and a blinking dot. “It’s a bit of a walk,” Shaun said. 

“Are you sure you can make it?” Malik asked.

Shaun looked up from his little box to frown at him. “You know,” he said, “you could stand to be kinder.” As far as reproaches about his attitude went, it was as gentle as a kitten’s mewl. 

“Or you could stand to be thicker-skinned. Only time will tell.” Malik motioned for Shaun to lead them on and fell into step behind him as they crossed the empty highway toward the woods on the other side. It was a steep climb up-up and into the dense pack of trees. 

\--

They were surrounded. The bodies over their heads were moving like whisper-winds through the limbs of the trees that had grown so tightly together they were akin to a well-woven basket. Shaun had stubbornly pushed forward through the slim spaces between trunks, tripped and stumbled over the thick underbrush with his shoulders slumping lower and lower the longer they walked. 

Malik waited for Shaun to look up, or to acknowledge that they were to be ambushed and he kept walking forward with his face staring at the green dot on the screen with increasing aggravation. They were unarmed, out in the open, in an unfamiliar place and so they were entirely defenseless. “Shaun,” Malik said finally, “perhaps you should ask one of them for directions.” He pointed up at the bodies in the trees that had stopped when Malik stopped. They were silent now, perched on the edge of branches with their weapons drawn and their breath stilled. 

Shaun stared up at the tree tops with his mouth hanging open and his glasses slipping down his nose. He tucked the box into his pocket and took a quiet step closer to Malik. “They should be from the den we’re headed to.” He put his hands up and stuck his elbow out at Malik to indicate he should do the same. “For God’s sake,” Shaun said when he made no move to do what he was asked.

So he put his hands up and the bodies started dropping out the trees to land in the tiny space all around them. “We’ll take you to the Grandmaster,” one of them said. Another one was patting Shaun’s body looking for hidden weapons and finding only gum and electronics. One of them patted at Malik with a dirty sneer before he moved away. “Follow me.” 

“You don’t happen to have a car, do you?” Shaun asked. And he grumbled to himself when he got no reply at all.

\--

The Grandmaster lived in a house set into the side of a mountain that looked down over an expanse of trees. The nameless Assassin’s that delivered them to the door faded away as soon as they set foot on the massive porch that wrapped around the whole of the home. Shaun walked toward the light without a second thought about it all being a trap and Malik followed after him with cautious steps. 

“You must be the ReCarn.” The voice came from the left (not right) and Malik turned toward it and saw something like a knife. His body reacted out of instinct to isolate and disarm the threat. He knocked against the hand in his peripheral vision that was holding the knife and followed through with three-quick hits to the body he could only just see. His first two attempts were knocked aside but he managed to land a third that knocked the breath out of the body and had it unwillingly folding in on itself. 

“Malik!” Shaun shouted.

Malik brought his knee up and heard the crack of bone when he connected with the man’s nose. He might have done more but Shaun was shouting at him to stop and the body hit the floor of the porch with a bloody sounding thump. He took two steps backward and felt his left hand tingle and tighten as he tried to activate the hidden blade and there was nothing in its place.

“Christ,” the body on the floor was saying. It hoisted itself back to its feet, fingers pinched over its bloody nose and head tilted back. Shaun looked absolutely horrified, started vomiting words that sounded placating and apologetic before motioning at Malik in the way that meant he was making excuses for him. “No, my fault. Let me take you inside to see the Grandmaster.” He bent low enough to grab the little silver knife he’d been holding a moment before and motioned that they should follow him.

The house was lavish-and-still simple. The interior of it was _warm_ and bright after so long spent wandering through the cold, dark wilderness in search of it. They made their way through a series of outer rooms, through a kitchen and down steps into a lower level where the sound of distant movement was only barely audible above the ricocheting sound of news programs playing across multiple screens. In the center of a dizzying room of screens was a single man in a massive chair set on wheels that had a pad of paper resting against his lap and a pen pressed against his lip. He was mouthing words under his breath as he looked from screen to screen.

“Grandmaster,” the man with the broken nose said.

The man didn’t acknowledge them for a moment, not until he’d scribble something down and then hit a button on the arm of the chair that silenced all of the screens. When the man stood he was impossible with height and width—a mammoth instead of a man. There was a scar that ran down from the left of his lower lip to somewhere under the open spread of his button-down shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows to show a spread of colored tattoos that were hard to make out at a distance. When he noticed the blood pouring out of the man’s face he sighed heavily and tossed the pad of paper onto the desk behind him. “Go see Carlotta.” He looked back at the two of them, “I suppose this was your doing.” He spoke directly to Malik and didn’t seem to notice or care that Shaun was there to translate his sloppy American English into Arabic.

Malik said nothing.

“Rosario said you were as pleasant as a root canal.” The man pushed the chair across the floor to the space behind the desk and reached up to grab a file off a set of shelves built into the wall behind the desk. “We don’t have a lot of time so let me skip the nice-to-meet you’s. My name is Thomas, everyone calls me Grandmaster. I just finished waging a war against a band of Templars that were trying to squeeze what little soul is left in the area—there’s not much, so you can imagine how important it was to save the little we’ve managed to maintain. The cops are convinced it’s some kind of occult-sado-masochism satan worshiping thing. So the boys have been stuck indoors for a while and well, that’s getting kind of boring, you know.” He slapped the file down on the desk. 

Shaun looked appalled but he translated the whole stream of words at only a slight delay. 

“The Templars were after this one city like it was a bitch in heat. It’s called Stratsburg and they spent six months trying to move in—oh, they tried everything. We went six days without sleeping hunting those little bitches down before they could get a chokehold on the people. They got the Mayor and that was a fucking disaster. I lost a man to that. So I ask myself what is it about this city that’s got them so damn _intent_ , you know. There sure as shit isn’t some mystical golden Apple buried in that piece of shit town. Not unless Ezio fucking Auditore figured out how to bend space in half to get his ass over here.” The man plucked a single photograph out of the file he had been rifling through and held it in his hand for a moment. He looked at it with a deep reverence, a level of respect Malik hadn’t seen (very much) in this new age. “We combed over that city. All over the country, all over the globe, we’ve been fighting a losing battle so you can imagine how bad the boys wanted to win this one.” There was the hesitation he claimed to hate, the flicker of indecision as he looked up from the photograph to Malik’s face. “Then we found the reason. I couldn’t believe it, but Stephen,” he nodded at the door, maybe at the man with the broken nose, “he checked it out. He said it’s a damn shot more likely than that unlucky bastard from New York that nearly got his brain fried. The dates match up, the signs are there.”

The room was too full of moving light, too tight and too short. Malik felt like he was funneling out of place and Shaun was just mumbling on and on in a soothing-curious string of words. There was a dread in the base of Malik’s stomach that was filling up his chest until he couldn’t stand the idleness of standing still and waiting. He moved forward two-three-five steps and plucked the picture out of Thomas’ hand. He flipped it over and looked at the glossy surface of it.

Malik-remembered-Altair in every single way he’d ever seen him, cast in the gray-toned shadows of distant memory. He remembered him young-and-old, arrogant-and-helpless but he hadn’t thought of him in the full brightness of living _color_ in so long he’d nearly forgotten the brown of his hair, the diluted tan of his skin, the way his lips and cheeks turned the same reddish-pink in the cold. It couldn’t-have-been anyone but Altair, born again in this ravaged, disgusting new time.

“Fuck you,” Malik said. He closed his fist around the photograph and threw it at him. If he’d been armed he would have thrown himself across the desk and tore the man’s throat out, he would have washed the house in the blood of the helpless little assassin’s that lived in it. The best he could manage was the defiance of his clenched teeth and the seething-hatred that filled the whole of his body from his feet to the tips of his hair. 

(You were only ever a means-to-an-end.)

“This is going to happen,” Thomas said. “I can send in a team, I can drag him out kicking and screaming or I can send you. What little they’ve learned from the Protocol is that ReCarns are attracted to each other on instinct. Either way, we’ve got to bring him in.”

There were too many thoughts in Malik’s head-all-at-once, a cluster of things that made no sense mashed so closely to the next one until the great disastrous noise of it turned into a numb kind of whiteness and he stood there with his teeth sank into his lip to keep from saying a single word. 

Shaun was a nervous flutter at his side. His left hand was hovering over Malik’s shoulder while he explained away his behavior with the utmost care and tittered on about how they would be happy to take a mission of such importance. Thomas nodded along with the up-down cadence of Shaun’s words while he looked at Malik. 

“Get some rest,” Thomas said, “you leave for Stratsburg in the morning.”

Malik thought, _I’ll slit his throat before I give him to you_ and it must have been written in his eyes because Thomas frowned at the very last second before Shaun pulled-and-pulled him out of place. 

\--

The room they were given (to share) was a ten-by-ten square taken up almost entirely by two single beds separated by a short table with a single lamp and a clock sitting on it. There was one window that was thin and high and clearly meant to do little but offer a superficial glimpse of real sunlight. The mattresses of the beds were stripped bare and stained here-and-there with brown spots that must have been blood once-upon a time.

One of the novice assassins brought them a pile of blankets-and-sheets to cover the beds. He was young (like a child) and still so-very-stupid as he stared at Malik with some combination of curiosity and horror until he scuttled out of the room and down the hall. Shaun was setting up his computer, mumbling to himself under his breath about things that he needed-to-do still. But weariness was heavy on his shoulders and thick in the spaces between his words. They did a spectacular job of ignoring one another until the computer was open and Shaun was aimlessly tapping at things.

“I didn’t know,” Shaun said. He stood up and turned to look at him. His square shoulders were caving in under fatigue (or guilt, or pity) and his glasses were slipping down his nose. “They’ve improved the process since you were… It’s not the same now as it was then.”

Malik said, “what can he possibly give you now that he has not already given you?”

Shaun looked wounded. He wasn’t spitting facts at him, wasn’t defending himself with a list of historical facts that still felt like future predictions to Malik. He said, “he knew more eight hundred years ago than we know now. The Templars are not going to give up until they have their hands on the Apple—”

“Ezio Auditore hid the Apple,” Malik said. He’d heard it on repeat in Italy. He’d been force-fed the legend of the great-and-powerful assassin, again-and-again. They were all very proud, in Italy, that Ezio had ever been born, that he had ever once lived there, that he had hidden the Apple where nobody could find. 

“Yes, and there are several factions of Assassin’s dedicated to trying to find it by whatever means necessary. But—Altair is the only person we know for sure ever withstood the power of the Apple. He was able to _learn_ from it. Not even Ezio,” and Shaun said his name with awe the same as every Italian Assassin that looked up to the long-dead Mentor. “Was able to _learn_ from it. He hid it because he thought it was inherently evil.”

“Ah, at last a reason to respect him.” Malik stripped off his jacket because it was damp with sweat and threw it across the end of one of the beds. His shirt was sticking to his skin and he pulled it off as well. “Altair wrote of everything he learned from the Apple.” Malik ground his teeth together and tried to relax the furious-white-anger that had lodged itself somewhere in his chest. “He gave the whole of his life to this war. We both gave our lives to this war, how much more do you intend to take?” He was shouting now.

Shaun put both of his hands up in defeat. 

\--

They slept, eventually. Malik wore the robes the doctors had given him when they declared his reincarnation an official success. They were made to be the same sort he wore in his first life. At the time he had been overwhelmed with things, unable to do more than cling to the familiar-nature of the robes. They were not the same, not much more than a mass-produced imitation of the ones he remembered. 

Shaun fell asleep with his computer propped up in his lap and his glasses halfway down his face. He hadn’t changed out of the clothes he’d been wearing for hours-into-days. Malik waited for the light snores before he took the computer and dragged Shaun flat on the bed to throw a blanket over him.

Malik lay on his own bed and stared at the ceiling until the weight of exhaustion pulled him down beneath the heated boil of his indecisive anger.

\--

The morning brought no promise of hope, only a diluted gray sunlight. Malik dressed himself in the quiet of the room with only Shaun’s light snores to distract him. The Italian Brotherhood had taken his weapons but they were kind enough to supply him with clothes when they sent him away. He wore black pants, a thin-white undershirt that clung to his chest tightly and a white shirt with little white buttons that were difficult to button in the early morning when his mind was sure that he’d lost his left arm many-years-ago. His shoes were sturdy-but-quiet when he moved and the jacket he pulled on over it was all-black with a sliver-thin strip of white tracing around the hood and down the front on either size of the zipper.

The house wasn’t quiet outside of his room. The hallway led even down into the deeper levels where the other Assassins were housed and trained and when necessary given medical treatment. Malik went _up_ toward the sound of the room with all of the screens and the distant whistle of fresh air. 

Thomas was sitting in the chair again, notebook in his lap, pen in his fist. At his side sat the kid (he looked so very young now) with the freshly broken nose. They were watching the screens, moving back and forth between several of them while they whispered something to themselves and then jotted down notes. 

Malik stood in front of them with both of his hands in his pockets. 

Thomas looked up at him and blinked owlishly, almost as if he was having trouble seeing anything besides the image of the screens burned into the fronts of his eyes. After a pause he muted the screens again and pushed his feet against the floor to slide back far enough to grab a package off the top of the desk. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Sixty four,” Malik said.

The kid with a broken nose hiccupped a laugh before he could stop himself and then completely ashamed of himself for having done so. He stared resolutely at his own hands when Thomas glanced over at him with a frown. Then Thomas said, “well, when you show up at the high school try to come up with a more believable age.” He held the package out to Malik. “It’s taken a bit of maneuvering but we were able to set you up as a student at his high school. You have a week to convince him to come willingly and then we’re going to take him by force. And when I say a ‘week’ I mean a very short week. Where is your translator?”

“Sleeping,” Malik said.

“So you do speak English.” Thomas settled back into the chair and considered this information. “Do you make him translate everything just for show?”

“No. Sometimes I can’t understand what you’re saying. Sometimes I can. I can always understand Arabic.” He pulled open the top of the package he was handed and pulled out a billfold and an assortment of other accessories to give him an identity. There was a single sheet of paper covered in tiny-black print that swam in-and-out of focus when he looked at it. “I can’t read this.”

“It’s your class schedule. I’ve been assured that you’ve got an impeccable memory so it shouldn’t be hard to memorize it.” Thomas handed him another photograph of Altair. He was very-young, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and he was looking over his shoulder with wide-open eyes. The camera was too far away to catch the strange glow of them but Malik had seen the man stare with such intensity countless times. He was using his second sight, the one that he had bragged about in their youth, the one that saved his hide time-and-time again as he grew older. “His name is Wren.”

The boy with the broken nose did a poor job of concealing his laugh by coughing. Thomas didn’t reprimand him this time but nodded agreeably. “It’s a stupid name. You’ll be leaving in an hour, and you’re taking your pet translator with you. Send him down to me.”

Malik nodded and folded the white paper back up and slipped it into his folder. 

\--

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Sleep had always been problematic for Wren. It started age three when he woke up screaming about drowning. He didn’t remember it (of course he didn’t) but his mother told him once he could graphically describe the sensation of drowning. A brilliant doctor had called them night terrors and his mother had quietly given up on the notion of ever being able to sleep again.

Wren was eighteen now, flat on the floor of his bedroom with his feet wedged under the edge of the bed frame so he could do sit ups. Years of being woken up by screaming had trained his mother to wake up at the slightest provocation, and years of avoiding waking her up had trained Wren to be silent-and-swift. He did sit ups then push-ups in sets of a hundred each. When his body was shaky and sweating, he would pause for ten minutes to catch his breath and let the sweat cool. Then he started again.

He crawled into his bed with spaghetti arms and pulled his blankets up to his ears—promised himself (one more time now) that he was really going to sleep this time. He would sleep-and-sleep and there would be no dreams.

\--

Mornings were all the same. He woke up, crept down to the treadmill on the back porch with the ear buds from his MP3 player in his ears. Music drowned out reality, and dreams, and existence as he ran-and-ran-and-ran in place. 

His mother found him, asked him how he slept and he lied to her before he turned off the treadmill and took a shower. He shaved in front of the mirror, made an effort to make his hair nice by putting gel in it so it stood up here and there. Then he got dressed: jeans, shirt, and hoodie with pockets big enough to put his phone in. 

Downstairs, his mother had made him waffles and cut up strawberries for him because she had this thing about cutting up fresh fruit for him long after he was old enough to do it himself. He ate while she chatted with him about her day and how she had to work late so he would have to take bus home. 

“Be good,” she told him before she went up to take a shower and get ready for work. “Call me if you need me.” (Call me if you have an episode, call me if you start seeing people in colors, if you faint, if you think you’re losing your grip on reality again.) 

“How good?” he asked. She cuffed him on the head and kissed his forehead before she left him alone in the kitchen. He looked over his shoulder just before she was out of the kitchen, squeezed his eyes shut long enough to concentrate on the aura of colors she didn’t believe he could see, and looked at the comforting blue of her hand waving him good bye as she rounded the corner and was gone.

\--

It wasn’t even that Wren liked or enjoyed lying to his mother. There had simply come a point in his life when he was being taken from pediatrician to psychiatrist to neurologist that lying had become self-defense and then basic-survival. He swore on the Bible (very sacred to his mother, kind of a blank nothing to him) that he didn’t see colors anymore. 

But he did, he saw them on everyone. He saw them any time he stood still long enough to concentrate and _look_ for them. When he was young and the therapists were still trying to convince him that he was going crazy (schizophrenic was a popular theory) had someone asked him why he would use such a power. They liked to call it a power, some of them called it a super power because they felt that it made it cool and fictional. 

Wren had said, ‘my neighbor Sam wants to hurt me.’ 

There had been a general consensus of worry and protest when he said it. Nobody had been able to accept that Sam-the-gentle-man that lived three doors down from him had an evil design toward anyone. Wren told them the man glowed as red as the devil for three years before the police came and took Sam away. They locked him up in a jail for men that did bad things to little boys. His mother asked him if Sam-had-hurt him but she never believed Wren when he said no.

\--

Wren’s original bus driver was gone. He had known Rickety Rick (as he liked to be called) for three and a half years before the man was abruptly removed from his post as the driver of bus 451 and replaced by a stranger that wore starched white shirts with meticulously well-kept collars. Wren had stood outside of the bus staring at the man through the thrown open bus doors until the second sight slipped over his vision, he watched the brilliant red glow of him flicker in intensity while the man yelled at him about getting on the bus.

Red-was-bad, so Wren told him he would get his Mom to take him and left. Two weeks later, he’d made an art form out of sneaking out the back and cutting across yards and through the woods to the high school over-three-miles away from his house. He arrived half-frozen and exhausted at the front doors just minutes before the bell went off but he arrived safe-and-unharmed which was more than he could have hoped for on the bus.

\--

Then there was “Big Dick” Richard that had decided to hate Wren on sight and made it his personal mission to remind Wren of it every-single-time they saw one another. It had been tolerable in the first semester when the number of times they saw one another was limited to the days Wren decided to eat lunch but second semester put him in his final physical education credit (the one he’d been avoiding for three years) which put him in the locker room with Big Dick on a daily basis.

They had it worked out to an art form, Dick shoved him into a locker oh-so-accidentally. The force of it knocked his breath loose in his chest and Dick laughed at him while he wheezed for breath before he let go of him because Wren-was-thin-and-harmless looking. 

Wren taunted him, “still in the closet?’

Dick called him gay, “Fag,” and kicked him or hit him somewhere he knew wouldn’t show. Wren took it because fighting back got him in trouble and trouble got his mother paying attention to his every-single-move again. Mother paying attention meant doctors and doctors meant the threat of involuntary commitment (again). Then Dick sauntered off like he owned the fucking world.

\--

Phys Ed was a waste of forty five minutes of his daily life. He spent most of the time with ice packs and trips to the nurse’s office. The coach thought he was a worthless sissy the way Big Dick did and Wren hated the way smugness rolled off the two of them at their own superiority. He thought violently of all the ways he could have best them, of all the ways he thought about taking them down hard and the satisfaction their sputtering disbelief would bring him.

But he sat on the sidelines of the indoor-basketball game with an ice pack on his ankle and played the part of a delicate little daisy because it was safe. He still had to wear the stupid gray sweat-pants and violet shirt with an angry badger across the front of it because “dressing out” was fifty percent of his grade. It would have been any other day, with him on the sidelines watching the way the colors of the players shifted depending on their intentions toward each other, if not for the coach showing up at his side with a new student in tow.

Coach was an ever present gray, too dull to be either good or bad. The new kid was a bright blue, perhaps the brightest blue that Altair had ever seen. He blinked and got his vision back, looked up at the kid’s face without the brightness of his aura around him. 

“Wren, this is Malik. He’s new, since you’re not playing maybe you could tell him some things.” The Coach was nothing if not an amazingly awkward human being. He motioned between the two of them and having done his part in delivering Malik to him turned back to the game in time to blow his whistle and yell about knocking people over. “Keep it clean!” 

Malik stood for a moment, looking unsure about his welcome. He was far too well dressed for high school—very clean black pants, shiny black shoes, very white shirt with very white buttons and a black jacket over it that had a shiny white stripe that ran down either side of the zipper. He had black-rimmed rectangle shaped glasses that made him look intelligent and harmless. “Hello,” he said. 

Wren nodded at him and said, “you can sit.” He pulled the ice pack off his ankle and dropped it on the bleachers on the side Malik hadn’t sat. “So you’re new.”

“Yes,” Malik said. He was clearly from somewhere in the Middle East but his voice sounded almost vaguely British. 

“Where’re you from?” Wren asked.

“Syria, England, Italy,” Malik said, “in that order. What about you?”

“Stratsburg since birth.” He hadn’t even left the same house since he could remember; he’d barely ever left the state since vacations weren’t possible when your Mother was convinced you were losing your mind. “Normally, you have to wear the uniform,” he motioned to his own body, “and do whatever they’re doing. It’s part of your grade.”

“Ah,” Malik said. He reached into his bag and dug around for a slip of paper that looked like his class list. For a moment he stared at it like the paper was physically assaulting him and then he rubbed at his eyes under his glasses and looked up at the people running back and forth across the court. “You don’t play?” 

“Injured,” Wren said. “What’s your next class?”

“Art history,” Malik said. Then he looked over at him, “your school is like a maze. The secretary in the office brought me here or I might not have found it.” He glanced back at the paper in his hand before folding it over and tucking it back in his bag. 

“I’ll show you,” Wren offered. Oh-and-Malik smiled at him.

\--

An unfortunate side-effect of never sleeping a full night was falling asleep without warning. He could feel the heaviness of it dragging him under toward the infinite dark of his nightmares but he almost never had the ability to do anything about it. The only good thing about falling asleep at school was that an offended teacher almost always made a point to wake him up before he got stuck in the nightmares. 

Mrs. Pritch was the only one that was decent about it. She said, “sleeping again, Wren?” But she didn’t threaten him with detention or calls to his mother, just shook her head at him and left him alone. 

In between second-and-third period he got a soda at the vending machine by the gym and drank half of it without stopping to breathe. It was a sudden rush of burning carbonation in his throat and a slower burn of caffeine in his system. Third period was advanced placement history (almost as boring as English). He sat in the back and drew swirls in the margin of his notebook to make it seem like he was doing something relevant. 

He was zoning out, watching his own hand glowing blue as it scratched nonsense into the paper, thinking about nothing at all. The bell sounded to signal release and he had to shake his head to get rid of the double vision of aura-over-life before he could get up. 

\--

Wren had given up on eating lunch in the cafeteria. He took his lunch outside and sat against the side of the building while he ate, enjoying the relative peace that it afforded him. 

It was raining hard so he had to stand under the overhang and eat with his little paper tray balanced in one hand and his bag squished between his back and the wall. The rain was cold and he thought unhappily of having to walk home in the deluge and resulting mud. 

The cafeteria door opened and shut and Malik was five-or-six feet away looking harassed and overwhelmed. He dropped his bag in the tiny dry space behind his body and tipped his head back. Both of his hands were on the back of his neck rubbing at sore spots and his eyes were closed as he took several quiet-deep-breaths. 

“Was it that bad?” Wren asked. 

Malik didn’t startle, just dropped his arms by his sides and looked over at him. For a brief second he looked like he didn’t understand what Wren had said and then he nodded and reached back to pick up his bag. “Too much sound,” he said. He walked over and stopped not so very far away from him. 

“Well it’s quiet out here,” Wren said. 

Malik leaned against the wall next to him and watched the rain. “Is that why you come out here?”

Wren nodded. They stood and listened to the rain until the bell sounded to call them back inside.

\--

Malik was in English with him. Wren was expecting him to be the sort of student that took studious notes and watched the teacher with the utmost respect and attentiveness. He wasn’t expecting him to sit in the very back of the class, slouching in his seat with his arms crossed over his chest and his face set in a petulant glower. 

Wren sat next to him because he had made the back row of the seats his domain years-ago. He leaned over the side of his desk far enough to slap Malik on the arm. “You have to take out paper and make it look like you’re writing notes or she’ll keep calling on you.” Actual participation wasn’t necessary so much as the illusion of being involved. 

So Malik pulled out a notebook and a pencil. 

English was is least favorite class, the one he was most likely to fall asleep in, but it was the only one he couldn’t effortlessly pass. He made a good attempt at paying attention but sleep was dragging at him and making everything seem too warm and too soupy. The chair wasn’t made to be slept in and he was too tall to slouch in it with any kind of real comfort but his exhausted body didn’t care. He found himself leaning forward, thinking he’d just rest his head for a moment. 

Then he was being punched in the arm. Wren sat up so fast he hit his head on the wall. Mrs. Smith turned away from her presentation to glare at him and Malik who was half out of his chair with his arm outstretched toward him. She reprimanded them for acting out and Malik slid back into his chair. Wren apologized and rubbed the sore spot on his arm. When Mrs. Smith was looking away from them again, Wren mouthed ‘thank you’ at Malik.

\--

Last period was senior seminar which amounted to learning how to fill out job applications and talking about their plans for the future. Wren had worked out exactly how many classes he could miss before he failed the class and used them wisely. 

“Is this class really necessary?” Malik asked. They were standing outside of the door while the other students moved around behind them toward their classes. A few of them were pushing their way into the classroom talking-loudly about classes-movies-boyfriends. Malik was looking down the hall toward the exit like he was weighing the pros and cons of walking out of his first day at school early. 

“No,” Wren said. “Want to skip?” 

Malik nodded and Wren pulled him down the hall toward the cafeteria exits. There was still a wealth of students moving around, enough to easily hide from the teachers-and-security guards that kept watch over students most-likely-to-bolt. Wren wove them past a cluster of drama-club kids and out through the door into the courtyard in front of the cafeteria. It was still raining outside and that limited their escape routes. Normally he just went back to his house, sometimes he walked up the road to the fast food place on the corner, but walking anywhere _right now_ seemed to be a waste. 

“Don’t suppose you have a car?” Wren said.

Malik shook his head. “Shaun would come get us though. I just have to call him.”

“Who’s Shaun?”

The question seemed to stump Malik for a moment. The look of comic confusion and momentary panic on his face was an amazing twist of his eyebrows and mouth that left him looking very stupid. Then he said, “he’s my guardian.”

“Oh.” That sounded decidedly messy. “Isn’t he going to be mad that you’re skipping a class?”

“I think he’ll be impressed I lasted as long as I did.” He accepted the phone that Wren offered to him but just stared at it like it was space-age technology before handing it back. “I don’t know how to make it work.”

Wren laughed at him, if only for how sincerely he said it. “What’s the number?”

They hid around a blind corner by the parking lot. Wren told him what he was missing in senior seminar and the best places to go whenever he needed to escape the masses while Malik nodded along agreeably. A completely-forgettable looking silver car pulled up behind the first lane of cars and a very preppy-looking sort of guy beckoned them toward the car. 

Malik went without pause but Wren took a moment to make sure Shaun didn’t glow bright red before he accepted a ride.

\--

Shaun was very British. He didn’t say much more than hello, and he asked Malik how his day was but even that limited bit of conversation was enough to demonstrate the full depth of his British-ness. There weren’t exactly an overwhelming amount of people with foreign accents that found themselves to Stratsburg, the least exciting town ever. 

Wren sat in the back seat and gave them directions to his house by landmarks, not street names. The car was conspicuously quiet with only the news playing on a very low volume. He squeezed his eyes shut to double-check they were both still blue because sometimes (not very often) people were able to summon enough good will toward him to fool him at first. They were both placidly blue in the front seats of the car.

“Your eyes are glowing,” Malik said. He was looking between the seats back at him.

“No they’re not,” Wren said. He blinked again and managed his best look of disbelief. 

Malik clearly thought he was a dumb liar but he didn’t call him on it. 

They made it back to his house without incident and Malik got out of the car to dash through the rain toward is front door. They stood awkwardly dripping water on his front porch while Wren tried to figure out a tactful way to ask why Malik was following him.

“Just act like I’m saying something polite,” Malik said. He looked as happy about being drenched in rain as a cat. His glasses were going foggy at the edges and his hair that had been sticking up all day was flat to his head. 

“Yeah. My Mom makes me write thank you notes,” Wren said. 

Malik grinned and it was the closest thing to happy he’d seemed all day. He looked back over at the car waiting for him at the end of the drive and the pour of rain between here-and-there. “See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Wren agreed. He waited until Malik was halfway back to the car before he unlocked the door and stood in the doorway and waved at them until they were pulling away before he went inside.

\--

Afternoon was the only safe time to sleep. His mother was away-at-work and she wouldn’t hear him if he woke up screaming. He’d made a habit out of curling up on the couch after school and letting his stupid body have its way. It gave him a few hours to try to sleep, and about a half an hour to sit and contemplate whether-or-not he really was losing his mind before he had to look one-hundred-percent normal for his Mother’s benefit.

\--

The dreams started in darkness, at the blank end of a long passage that seemed to have been clawed out of the very earth itself. Everything was dusty-dirt under his hands when he reached out in the blackness to touch and everything smelled-like hot-dry-sand. When he moved, the floor rose-and-sank under his feet. There was something swishing around his legs, something tight at his waist that was heavy and strange feeling when he ran his fingers across it. 

He had walked down the passage for _miles_ in all the years of his life he’d been brought back to the same dream. He had searched for an end to the blackness, had memorized the feeling of the walls, the folds of his own clothes. Sometimes he heard sounds, muffled and distant kinds of noises that seemed to bleed through the walls. The words were-foreign (not his) and very far away but he had memorized the sound of the voices that shouted them, sat in place in the corridor and wondered what they were saying and if he were ever meant to find them.

Sometimes, there was blood. It sloshed at his feet and it covered his hands and his face and the robes that he wore. It filled his head until it was all that he could smell and it dried in place between his knuckles until he woke up from clawing at his own skin.

There was water, sometimes, and the old-familiar fear of it. The sound of it filling the passage, the feel of it swishing around his ankles and creeping up his shins as he ran through it. He ran in mortal terror, rubbed his hands against the black edges of the tunnel looking for handhold but the water came for him anyway. It tugged at his knees, it gripped his thighs and squeezed his waist and wrapped around his chest. It rushed up his throat and slipped down inside of him until he woke up in his bed screaming so-loud and so-hard he couldn’t remember how to stop.

But there had never been light, and there had never been _people_ in the dreams. Never before. He found a curve in the tunnel that he didn’t remember and he followed it out into the dim-grayness of a distant light. His feet were silent-as-air and his body moved with well-practiced ease. There was a body near the light, a silhouette of a head and shoulders that slowly became the full height of a person. 

He twitched his left fist just-a-little and reached out with his right to grip the body on the shoulder before he brought his arm forward and shoved as-hard-as-he could. The blade sank through fabric-and-skin straight into _flesh_. The body jerked as a reflex but went heavy and lifeless as it fell back against him. It was easy to guide him down to the ground, easy to lay him beneath the halo of dim light. Another flinch of his left hand put the blade back into its place and Wren was free to look at the face of the man he’d killed. 

“Novice,” Malik said just seconds before he shoved a knife through Wren’s neck.

\--

Wren had learned not to scream the way he’d learned not to mention the dreams. He woke up with both hands over his mouth and a rattling-wet-shriek in his throat that he bit into his fingers. With his feet firmly on the floor and his body bent forward, he sucked in hair through the tight grasp of his hands over his mouth and tried to work through the panic that made his whole-body shake. 

“It’s not real,” he said to himself, “it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.”

\---&\---

“Is that really him?” Shaun asked him as soon as Malik was back in the car. He made no pretenses about watching Wren-the-ridiculously named child wave at them with too-much interest. The whole of the hotel room had been overtaken by Altair’s life’s history spread across the wall and copies of what few pages of the Codex they’d managed to find.

“Yes,” Malik said, “if Altair had ever been a skittish, uncertain young child.” 

Shaun pulled away from the curb. “I did some checking into his history while you were at school. All unofficial, of course, but it never hurts to double check facts. The usual list of factors checked out, as far as we can tell he was born the same day and approximately the same time as his first life.”

“I don’t care,” Malik said. Because he’d stood close enough to look at him, to see every identical part of his face and the very-same tone of his voice. He’d seen his eyes when he stared at them with his eagle vision and determined them friendly enough. 

“Well, the interesting thing is that he spent several years under the care of psychiatrists. He has a history of violent night terrors, visual and aural hallucinations. He apparently claimed to be able to see people as ‘colors’ and told the doctors the colors told him if someone was going to hurt him or not. Of course, they think it’s because he was molested by his neighbor. He spent a week in an institution for intensive treatment, a year of weekly visits, another of biweekly and then apparently was declared cured.” Shaun paused to make a turn and drove at half speed until he found the correct road to make another turn and stopped them in a deserted looking parking lot next to a line of apartments that looked as if they were falling apart under the force of the rain. 

“Was he molested by his neighbor?” Malik asked.

Shaun shrugged, “there’s no conclusive evidence. But the neighbor he accused of being ‘as red as Satan’ did turn out to be a sex offender. I think he’s been remembering things about his past he can’t explain and the only logical thing his Mother could do was to assume he was suffering from a mental disorder.”

It explained why Wren had started making strangled little noises when he fell asleep in class and the sheer-white-terror on his face when Malik woke him up. There was more than-enough horror in Altair’s past to keep an ignorant child from sleeping. “Why are we here?”

“Oh,” Shaun dug under his seat for a printed-photo and handed it over to him. It was a middle-aged man wearing a starched white shirt, looking half-away from the camera. “This is Victor Role. They recently identified him as a Templar after someone noticed Wren stopped taking the bus and looked into him. They trailed him back here to apartment 24C and I volunteered you to take care of it.” 

“I don’t have any weapons,” Malik said. 

“Under your seat,” Shaun said. He rattled off the directions to a meeting-place for after it was done while Malik pulled on the gloves and strapped the hidden blade to his arm and hid a pair of knives in his pockets and wished him good luck when Malik climbed out of the car into the pouring rain.

\--

Victor Role was not at home. Malik took a moment to assess his options—waiting in the sparse bit of woods just beyond the apartments, returning later when the man was more likely to be home, or finding a way to break into his apartment to wait for him. The front door was clearly not an option as it was locked and Malik did not have the tools to open it without it being obvious that it was forced.

He circled around to the back of the apartments, sighed at the dilapidated looking balconies. There was a central pole that ran up a stack of them so he backed up enough to get a good running start and was able to get enough traction from the slick-metal to grab the moldy wooden base of the second story. He lifted himself up, caught the bannister that sagged and groaned under his weight. 

Then it was a matter of counting the apartments across and hopping from balcony to balcony until he reached the glass-door at the back of 24B. He climbed up onto the bannister of the balcony and took a steadying breath. The rain was heavier now than when he started, his shoes were slick from the water and the mold on the wood and his hands were cold and getting clumsy. 

He ran across the narrow bannister and up the metal bar that supported one side of it, used it to jump up-and-sideways to grab the floor of the balcony over his head and nearly lost his grip. His left hand slipped and his right fumbled but caught on the wood well enough he was able to pull himself up and catch the rickety guard rail.

Once on the balcony, breaking in through the glass doors was a simple matter of knocking a single metal pin out and sliding them open. Inside was dull and musty. There was an assortment of weapons on a table with a spread of dirty take-out dishes sitting at one end. The living room (he guessed) was bare except for the table and a series of black boxes with a laptop sitting on top. 

The kitchen was empty except for the trash and the rancid odor of molding food. The bathroom had only the barest of necessary essentials and a photo of a woman stuck into the mirror. Malik plucked it out of the metal frame of the mirror and turned it over but there was no writing on it. 

There was only one bedroom, with a bare mattress sitting in the middle of it, a clock radio and a pile of clothes. There was a closet that was pulled open but empty. According to the clock it was just-after-two in the afternoon. 

Malik crept back out toward the living room, peeked out the corner of the front-facing window to be sure that there was nobody on the narrow landing in front of the door before he undid the locks and pulled it open to be sure it was the right apartment.

Then he closed it and locked it and settled against the wall behind it to wait.

\--

Altair had been driven mad by waiting. He was as furious as a beast in a fight, capable of inhuman feats of skill and cool calculated strikes. It was the quiet before the battle that had challenged him. Malik had schooled himself to be quiet-and-still while remaining alert. 

He waited for two hours, still and alert, without thinking of anything but exactly how he would strike and all the possible ways his target could fight back. It was planned out as thoroughly as it possibly could have been. When the key slid into the lock and the door opened, Victor walked in carrying his take-out dinner with a wet newspaper over his head and a viciously unhappy curse at the weather. He stepped past Malik and kicked the door shut without a single suspicion.

Malik took one-two steps up behind him, put his hand around the man’s mouth and used the hidden blade to stab through his ribs. It wasn’t as accurate as he would have liked, it missed the man’s heart but it tore through his lungs and incapacitated him. The bags of takeout dropped to the floor and Victor went heavy as he fell back into Malik’s body. 

“You,” Victor said when he saw his face. Malik crouched next to him, moved his wrist to retract the blade and watched the desperate pink-panic in the man’s face as he turned his head enough to see his blood spreading in a puddle across the floor. 

“How many of you are here?” Malik asked.

“Many,” the man said. His voice was wet with the sound of blood filling his lungs, he was catching at his chest and the pain of being drown from the inside out. His panic turned to anger and he slapped crudely out toward Malik, manage to catch at his jacket but didn’t manage to hold it in his thick fingers. “We should have left you dead.”

“At last, we agree. You will not die quickly this way.” He had been the harbinger of death often enough in his youth to know a poor execution when he saw one. Kadar had been especially terrible at efficient assassinations and he’d been a mess of guilt in the days-and-nights after. 

“More are coming,” Victor said. He smiled briefly, a touch of blood at the corner of his mouth when he moved his tongue. “We’ve been waiting for you. She told us you would lead us to him. She told us to follow you.”

“Who did?” Malik demanded.

The man was pulling at his shirt, trying to get through the constricting tightness of it to his skin. His voice was a low moan now, his eyes were bulging in their sockets, blood was bubbling in his mouth when he panted for breath. “Mercy,” he said, “mercy.”

“That I can give,” Malik said. He put his hand against the man’s forehead and tipped it back far enough to slash his throat and spill what little of his blood was left to spill. He fell still in a matter of seconds—blank and empty. 

\--

Malik went out the back door, slipped down the balconies and shoved his hands in his pockets as he ducked his head in the rain. He went through the trees at the back of the apartments toward the road on the other side. It was a twenty-minute walk to the meet up point.

Shaun was there with his laptop, looking content and warm in a coffee shop with free wireless (an internet thing, he was told) sipping tea out of a paper cup. Malik stood outside the window and rapped his knuckle against it, didn’t even have the energy to laugh when Shaun almost spilled his drink on himself. 

It was another fifteen minutes before they were at the hotel. He dropped his clothes in a puddle on the carpet and stood in the shower with the hot water on until it started to go cold. When he came out the room was delightfully hot in a manner that Shaun detested which meant he’d turned it up specifically to accommodate him. He was sitting at the desk stripped down to his white-undershirt with beads of sweat on his forehead and stuck at the back of his neck. 

“More are coming,” Malik said. He pulled on his robes and then a blanket and sat on his bed trying to get warm.

\--

It was hours later, after a disappointing dinner of soggy chicken and half-cooked rice, after Shaun took a shower and came out looking defenseless in his pajama pants with his thin and lightly muscled chest bare, after Shaun looked over the papers he’d been given and explained what they meant and what he should say about them, when Shaun said: “I thought you were going to kill him, you know. I didn’t say anything to the Grandmaster because I was hoping you wouldn’t but I just felt like you would.”

Malik was folding the long end of the white robe over his hand. “I have thought about killing Altair many times in my life. When we were young and he was stronger than me, he would knock me down and tell me to ‘try harder’ and I thought if I could I would have hurt him. When his arrogance took my arm and my brother from me, I would have gladly been his executioner. When he was pardoned for his crimes and sent to me as a novice, I wished that his arrogance would be the end of his life. In the time after, I thought freely of killing him but it was nothing more than exasperation at him. I imagined the Apple would overtake him one day and Maria or I would be tasked with ending his life—” They had talked about it quietly while Altair was caught up in his studies of the damned thing. “I intended to kill him today.” The smile on his face was like a punch of pain in his chest. “I should have, he deserves more.” 

“Malik,” Shaun said uselessly.

“There may have been a time in my life that I was capable of killing him, but that time has passed.” He-was-tired then, exhausted by the day and the rain and the whole weight of the unknown future. “Good night.”

Shaun whispered good night back to him like an apology.


	3. Chapter 3

The clock was a steady red three AM when he woke up with a scream clotting in his throat. He clawed at his blankets, kicking and shoving at them until he was free of them. His back was against the headboard and his knees were against his chest and he was biting into his fist to keep from screaming-again because he could feel the cold-grip of water all over his body.

Reality came slowly back into focus, the brightness of the three nightlights, the familiar drone of the house after-dark, and the soft-cotton of his bed sheets. He took his fist out of his mouth and let a breath whistle out.

“Still breathing,” he reminded himself. “We’re still breathing.”

\--

Sometimes he laid on the couch and watched early-early morning TV like a mindless drone. There was a channel that played nothing but reruns of old-favorite TV shows and it was good for when he was sleep-deprived and uneasy. His mother smiled at him fondly when she found him lying on the couch with a blanket pulled up to his ears.

Not very often, but now-and-again, he fell asleep on the couch between three-and-four AM when the classic TV heroine did something lovable-but-zany on the screen. It came over him like a shadow falling and he landed on his feet in the long-empty-dark corridor.

The water came again, rushing in from the ground beneath him. Wren had been drown a hundred-thousand-times in his dreams, he knew exactly how it was meant to happen but it didn’t stop him from running down the rapidly-filling corridor toward an exit that he’d never found. The water was a heavy weight around his knees, the panic in his chest a constricting band making it hard to breath, when a hand caught him by the shoulder and pulled him _hard_ to the left.

He fell into dry-ground, gasping for breath belly-down on hard clay with his fingers digging into it so hard his nails felt like they were being tore back. His savior was standing in front of him, wearing brown boots and some kind of robe that fell long-white-and heavy to his calves. Wren tried to roll over and look up at him but the body moved away before he could see him. 

Malik’s body was lying in the distance, his blood long since turned sticky-and black against the ground. There was a great wealth of insects squirming in-and-out of his corpse where it had split open under his clothes. Wren jerked back away from it so far that he nearly fell backward. 

A hand caught his hair and another wrapped around his chest. There was a body at his back and the hard-cold press of a blade against his throat. The voice in his ear said, “we have to do better this time.” There was no question, just fact. They simply were not going to allow Malik to die again. 

\--

His mother was sitting in the big arm chair at the end of the couch when he woke up. She was wearing her worried-Mom bathroom with a mug of coffee in one hand and her other hand pressed to her cheek. The TV had been muted and there was no steam coming out of her cup so-who-knew how long she’d been there.

“Hi,” he groaned. He stretched on the couch and rubbed his neck where it had gone stiff from sleeping on his arm. 

“Nightmares?” she asked.

Wren sat up and pulled the blanket off his legs to toss it in a pile at the opposite end of the couch. He checked the clock over the TV for the time (six twenty three) and stretched before he collapsed in place and said, “no.”

“I heard you skipped Senior Seminar again,” she said. Because she was a Mother and she was good at throwing out things like that all sneaky-and-sure. “Care to tell me why?”

Nope. Wren stared at his knees, picked at the lint that was caught there. “There was a boy,” he said. But could someone really call Malik a boy? He was young enough, really, but he didn’t act like a boy. He didn’t walk with the confused confidence of a real eighteen year old, all swagger and no substance. 

“A boy,” she repeated.

When he looked at her she was impressed-not-mad and that was good-for-him. She turned her coffee cup on the arm of the chair and licked her lips. They had been mired in the depths of his mental problems for-so-long that any breath of normalcy was a strange and wonderful occasion. Her smile was sweet.

“His name is Malik Al-Sayf,” Wren said. “He’s a new student.”

“Is he really cute?” she asked.

Wren had to have turned a brilliant shade of red because she made one of those embarrassing-Mom sounds. “Yeah,” Wren said, “he’s from Syria, I think he said. But he kind of has an English accent. We have a couple of classes together and we started talking and I hate Senior Seminar so I asked him to skip with me.”

Mom was chin-in-hand smiling at him. There was nothing at all stern or reproachful about her when she said, “well let’s not make corrupting new students a thing we do.”

“I’ll try,” he promised. And since she was feeling all twinkly and fond of him he said, “can you drive me to school today?” For once she didn’t ask him why but agreed and then went to make breakfast without giving him a hard time.

\--

Wren was late to Phys Ed and was consequently the only one in the locker room when he changed. It was a nice change of pace to get completely dressed without having someone shove him around and insult his sexual orientation. He palmed his pass from the office that declared him officially tardy and walked down the hall to the gym. The doors were open and he paused just outside of them when the unbelievable noise of the motion of too many bodies stuck-inside came rolling out. 

Inside, the divider was standing between the two halves of the court. The dance PE drama kids were on one side learning to waltz and the poor fools that got slated into regular-old Phys Ed were on the other running drills from one side of the court to the other. The coach was blowing his whistle and yelling insulting encouragement at the slow runners. 

Wren handed him his note and the coach slipped it under the metal catch of his clipboard. It was easy-enough to find a place to slip into the motion of bodies. They moved from running to jumping jacks. Wren found himself standing behind Malik who had the violet colored shirt on with a pair of black pants. 

It was easy to stare at him, the sweat at the back of his neck, the way his arms were muscled from wrist to shoulder, the easy-fluid way his body moved as he did an infinite repetition of jumping-jacks.

They split into groups, given a variety of challenges and assigned a student leader that was meant to make sure everyone was actually (at least pretending to be) doing what they were supposed to. Malik ended up in his group under the metal pull-up bars. There were a few other sorry types that complained bitterly about pull ups. 

“I’ll go,” Malik said. He stepped up to the slightly-lower bar and reached over his head to grab it. 

“Race?” Wren said. It was out of his mouth before he even knew that he was going to say it but the way Malik grinned at him made him think it was-exactly-right. So he grabbed the higher bar and said, “ready when you are.”

At five pull ups their group divided into two sets and started rooting for them individually. They compared the amount of sweat and the apparent effort they were putting into their individual pull ups. At ten, a few of the girls from the group that was supposed to be doing stretches wandered over to join. At fifteen, another group stopped pretending to do their own activity and turned around to gape at them.

At twenty, Wren said, “getting tired yet?”

At twenty five, Malik said, “looking a little wobbly, Wren.”

At thirty the coach came over to ask what was going on. Mary told him about their friendly challenge while the score keepers chanted another number in sync. Wren didn’t have a sturdy enough bar to do pull ups in his bedroom after his mother went to sleep but he’d been doing push-ups since he was ten. 

Malik, when he looked, was pure concentration with his body tightly controlled and the motion of his arm an easy-fluid contract-and-release. There was no sign of strain or effort save for the tightness of his teeth and the sweat gathering at the edge of his hairline. 

At thirty five, the whole class was standing there rooting for them. 

At forty the coach was officially impressed with a proud nod as he explained to the other coach who came over to check out what all of the commotion was about. 

At forty five, Wren was getting tired but Malik was still moving like a machine up-down-up-down. 

Then, at fifty, coach called it off, told them to drop and walk around the gym to cool off. Malik hung from the bar with his knees bent and looked over at him like it was a challenge he couldn’t afford to lose. Wren dropped to his feet and rubbed at the sore-feeling of his palms while the crowd dispersed back to their own activities. 

“Not bad, Al-Sayf,” Wren said. He elbowed Malik good-naturedly and nodded him toward the edge of the court where they were supposed to walk. 

“Not bad yourself.” He fell into step after only a moment’s pause and they did two turns in peace while they worked on cooling off and letting the sweat dry.

\--

Big Dick made his appearance in the locker room after class when everyone was trying to change and move on to classes less likely to make them smell like salty-swamp monsters. A few dedicated students took showers in the stalls at the back of the locker room but mostly there was a lot of deodorant and pride in manly stink.

Malik was sitting next to him on the bench grimacing about the sweat he was mopping off his face with his shirt. He had a bag, not a locker, and his shirt was wrinkled in a way that made him frown all over again. 

There was a starburst scar on the back of his left shoulder that looked exactly-like every bullet wound Wren had ever seen on TV. He was touching it before he could summon up enough brain cells to stop himself. Malik just looked at him over his shoulder.

“Sorry,” Wren said. He moved his hand away and finished stripping out of his unsightly gray sweatpants to put on his jeans. The coach shouted at them to behave and the door to the locker room slammed shut. Malik was behind him putting his arms into the long-sleeves of his button-down shirt. 

Big Dick came around the corner with a big-smile and his arms outstretched like they were the best of friends. He said, “look at the little faggots.” He reached out toward Malik and tried to get his hand around his shoulder but Malik moved away from him with an easy step-to-the-side.

Wren let himself be pulled in because resistance-was-futile. He looked to the conspicuously empty aisle where just a minute ago there had been a crowd of witnesses. They were still in the room somewhere, hiding just out of sight. “Let it go,” Wren said.

“Why don’t you introduce me to your little fag friend,” Big Dick said with a coo.

Malik finished pulling his shirt on, tugged at his collar to get it in place and then stepped forward with his hand outstretched. “My name is Malik.” He kept his hand out even after Big-Dick looked at him and laughed. 

“Don’t,” Wren mumbled.

Big Dick grabbed Malik’s hand in both hands, tightening them like he meant to crush the hand in his grip and Malik stared right at Dick’s red-round face with the least impressed look ever. He took a step forward, pushed his hand through Dick’s meaty fists to catch his wrist and pulled hard so Dick lost his balance and fell forward. There was a flat-hard slap of fist against flesh and a high-pitched wheezing scream before Big Dick fell over the bench and landed hard on his side. 

Malik looked down at him as he started buttoning his shirt from the button up. “Learn some manners,” he said. He stopped at the fourth button, picked up his bag and put it over his shoulder before he looked at Wren, “you coming?”

“Yeah,” Wren said. He yanked his shirt on, grabbed his bag and worked on buttoning-his-pants as he tried to get his shoes and walk at the same time. He fell through the door behind Malik and crowded close against his back until they made it around a corner without any teacher shouting at them to stop. “Oh my God,” he said.

Malik looked over his shoulder and then shoved his elbow into Wren’s body to shove him into the space by the vending machine. His hand was against his chest and his body was close-enough-to-be indecent. “Don’t let people hurt you,” he said. “You’re better than that.”

( _We have to do better this time_.) “Well, you’re the first one to think so,” Wren said. He crouched to fix his shoes and finished zipping his pants. 

Malik finished buttoning his shirt. “What did he call us?”

“Fags,” Wren said, “uh—gay? Homosexual.”

For one awful second Malik’s face went perfectly blank. It was the same look that people got before they started shouting at him about going to hell. (To be fair, that had only happened once, but it was memorable nonetheless.) But when Malik blinked he was just himself again. “Oh,” he said. “I have Earth Science, where is that?”

“I’ll show you.”

\--

Wren found out about the bus driver at lunch when Lizzie who rode the bus stopped him and asked him if he heard about it. “About what?” (About how the bus driver was possessed of the same satanic red glow as the child molester that lived down the street? Except Wren did not see people in shades of intent anymore.)

“He was murdered,” she said. Her face was brilliant pink with some bastard child of excitement and fear. “I heard they found him in his apartment this morning and someone had stabbed him.”

Bad things happened to bad people. Wren said, “that’s awful.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. Then she was off again to find someone that cared more. 

\--

Malik was still blue when he came outside to sit next to Wren. He was eating a chicken sandwich and fries like he hated everything about his life. When he glanced over at Wren he rolled his eyes at him and said, “that’s cheating.”

Wren said, “it’s a natural advantage, like longer legs.”

“This is terrible,” Malik said. He dropped the sandwich into the paper tray and tried one of the skinny-soggy fries and from the twist of his lips it was not much better. “You have no taste buds at all.”

“Of course I don’t, I’m eighteen. It’s food, I eat it. The circle of life continues.” Wren was eating pizza, not chicken, but Malik wouldn’t have liked the pizza either. “What’s your next class?”

“I forget,” Malik said. He said it like it didn’t matter to him. He dug into his bag and pulled out the paper before he held it out toward him. “I can’t read this,” he said.

Wren was going to say something really sarcastic about not being able to read English when Malik was from England but he looked down at the paper and saw Malik’s name across the top of it. It read: Malik A Hastings. All of the air in his lungs felt like it was punched suddenly out of his body and he dropped the paper and shoved himself away from it like it was on fire.

“What?” Malik said.

“I called you Al-Sayf,” Wren said.

Malik picked up the paper and looked at it without reading it before he said, “this says Hastings,” he said.

“I called you Al-Sayf,”

“You already said that. Al-Sayf is my name, Hastings is Shaun’s name. They changed it before I started at the school. It’s not that important.” He made it sound so _rational_ , so _simple_. “Are you okay?”

No. I have a history of knowing things I shouldn’t. “Sorry,” Wren said. “I didn’t sleep well.” He took the paper back when Malik it offered it to him. “Did you tell me your last name was Al-Sayf?”

“How else would you have known it?” Malik asked. He smiled to be reassuring and dropped the paper lunch tray on the ground because he’d given up on trying to stomach it. “What’s my next class?”

“French,” Wren said, “I can show you where it is, it’s what I’ve got.” He folded the paper over and handed it back to Malik. 

\--

French passed in an unexciting jumble of foreign language. Malik looked like someone was drilling screws into his skull the entire time. After French, they both had a free period. They found their way back out to the courtyard where the sun had made a stunning comeback after almost two days of soupy-gray clouds. 

Malik looked like he was going to implode out in the sunlight. His face was pale and tight and he pulled his hood up over his head to shield his eyes from the too-bright burn of light. Both of his fists were in his pockets but it was clear that he was in some kind of excruciating pain. 

“Are you okay?” Wren asked. (We must do better this time.) “Do you need to go to the nurse?”

Malik answered him in a language that he didn’t understand and then turned around and kicked the column at his side. He ducked his head and put both of his hands on his ears and bobbed his head up-and-down before he turned back around. He took a breath and said, “headache. Can you call Shaun?” Then he moved out of the sunlight back toward the shade against the wall. He didn’t sit so much as wilt to the ground.

Wren pulled out his phone and found the number he’d called the day before. He crossed over to where Malik was sitting with his face in his knees and put out his hand to touch him but stopped just as his fingers were close enough to graze the tips of his hair. 

Shaun picked up with: “hello?”

Wren said, “um, it’s Wren, Malik’s friend from yesterday. He’s having like a migraine or something and he wanted me to call you.”

“I’ll be there immediately,” Shaun said. Then he hung up. 

Wren tucked his phone back into his pocket and hesitated with his hand still out in the air before he decided the worst thing that could happen was Malik punching him. He put his hand on Malik’s shoulder and squeezed at the too-tense muscle there. “I don’t like French either,” he said to be funny.

Malik’s response was a laugh that came out as a groan. He didn’t move, just kept his hands against his ears and his face against his knees. “Are you rubbing my shoulders?” he asked after a moment.

Wren stopped, “yeah?”

“Ok,” Malik said. 

It wasn’t effective rubbing. It probably wasn’t much more than awkward fumbling but it felt like he was actually doing something productive when he rubbed at the too-tight, too-tense clench of muscles. The longer he worked at it, the closer he found himself to Malik until he was breathing into his hair. That close he could hear the ragged lilt of Malik’s breathing. A car pulled up behind him and a door opened and slammed shut. Panic moved through Wren that made-no-sense but he wrapped both his arms around Malik’s body and kissed the side of his head. “Get better,” he said, “be back here tomorrow.”

Then Shaun was there looking worried. He was saying something that Wren wasn’t listening to. It was Malik he was looking at, the curious way he stared at him with half-shut eyes. His teeth were clenched too tight to speak through but he did nod his head before Shaun was pulling him up to his feet and making promises about how he would be alright.

“Just a migraine,” Shaun said.

(We must do better this time.) “Feel better,” Wren said.

\---&\----

Once, quite a long time ago, Malik had been held still while surgeons sawed what remained of his bloodied, swollen arm off. The pain had been unimaginable—unlivable, he had been sure in the catches-of-breath between screams that he would die from this and it hadn’t seemed so very terrible at the time. If he died, he could have gone to join his brother. The pain had overwhelmed him and he thought he might have been begging to die.

The blackness that dragged him into unconsciousness had been acute-and-painful, not at all comforting as it drown him with relentless violence. Once he had fallen under it, though, there had been peace that was interrupted only by brief-and-painful moments of surfacing back into a world made of worried faces and bloodied bandages where his left arm had once been.

But this pain did not give even after it drove him under a heavy cloud of blackness. He was left aware of the intensity of it, the way it clutched claws in through his skull, the tightness of it constricting until the pressure itself made him gasp in pain. His body was soaked in sweat and he could feel the tremble of his limbs as he fumbled in the darkness to find anything that felt-or-sounded-or-smelled familiar. His stomach was rolling over, his throat was laced with the acidic flavor of bile. 

Shaun was there—somewhere—hovering out of distance, moving around in the darkness and talking in gibberish. He had moved Malik from the bed where he’d dropped him to somewhere that was hard-and-cold and left him with a blanket to try to drive away the chill. 

\--

Altair was not a phantom in his dreams but real and whole, wearing a gray hood instead of white and sitting on a cushion across a blank space from him. There was a variety of knives on the floor around him and one in his hand that he was cleaning with the spare end of his robes. 

Malik was crawling like a dog, wearing the black-robe of a Dai that hung loosely off his missing arm and dragged in the dust that was caked onto the floor. He fell onto the cushion that was across from Altair and thought fondly-of-death. The pain in his head followed him into his dream where it resounded off the walls with a steady thrumming getting louder-and-then quieter only to become louder again. 

“Malik,” Altair said quietly. He was stiff-backed and arrogant in his youth, easily dismissing him as a waste of time as he continued to clean his weapons. They had been paired together on training missions in their youth, been sent out to collect information but he couldn’t swear that he had ever sat across from the man like this. If it was not a memory it must have been a hallucination. “You look ill,” Altair said.

“I suppose I do,” Malik said. The cushion was like sandpaper against his cheek, rubbing his skin until he thought he might have been bleeding (or sweating). “Can I not be free of you even in my own mind?”

Altair finished cleaning the knife in his hand and slid it into the sheath that he wore on his back before he set them both the side. He pushed the hood off his head, rubbed his hand through the mess of his damp brown hair. “I suppose not. You can hardly blame this on me, can you?” He shifted his perfect posture so his shoulders were rolled forward ever-so-slightly. 

“You have been many things in life but you were never innocent,” Malik said. He rubbed his fist against the pain behind his right eye and pressed his left ear harder against the roughness of the cushion if only to block out the rage of sound all around him. “You could tell me why you are here, unless I am meant to guess why you’ve invaded my hallucination.”

Altair was moving, falling forward with his palms flat against the ground and his knees against the cushion. He did not crawl, precisely, but stalk across the close space between them and put his hand on Malik’s right shoulder to roll him onto his back. Altair sat his left and leaned across and over his body so his elbow was on the floor next to his ribs but his face was very close to Malik’s. “You do not suffer from doubt, my friend. You never have.”

“You have never been plagued by certainty,” Malik said. And because it was a hallucination, because his body was _shaking_ at every joint, twitching with every muscle, he pressed his palm against Altair’s chest. He expected, maybe, that it would slip through him as things sometimes went in dreams but instead it pressed against the familiar solidity of his body. 

“If I have to die,” Altair said to him (so close now, Malik could have counted his eyelashes), “do not let me die alone.” He didn’t kiss him, as Malik thought he might, but bring his right hand up to brush the soaked hair out of Malik’s face. 

“We will die together,” Malik said.

Altair smiled, just a thin wisp of a smile, and settled his weight lower so it was pressing across his already aching ribs. His chin was pointy-and-painful when it pressed into his body but he looked up at him and let Malik rub his sweat-sticky hand through his hair and trace the shape of his smooth cheek and jaw. 

“Why are you smiling at me?” Malik said. The drumming at the walls was getting louder and the shadows at the edges of the room were getting thicker-and-closer. 

“I would die with you,” Altair said. “But I would much prefer to live with you. Neither matter much because there is someone in the room.” His face was being overtaken by shadows, the last bit of him that Malik could make out in the dimness was the curl of his lips into an arrogant smile. “Try harder, Malik.”

\--

Malik woke up in the bathtub, shaken awake by his own violent shudders. Shaun was laying in the space next to the tub with his head pillowed on a towel and his glasses crooked on his face. There was a foul-smell in the room—puke and piss and a thick-and-stinking sweat. The room was frigid, the towel that covered Malik was soaking wet against his bare skin. The door was half-open to the bright interior of the hotel room and if Malik held his breath and bit the inside of his cheek he could hear the shuffle of very-quiet feet across carpet.

His body was weak-and-useless as he fought up to his feet, trying to quiet and managing nothing but a lesser number of knocked bones against hard porcelain. He stepped over the high side of the tub and then across Shaun’s curled legs to fumble at the stuff laid out on the sink. There was a razor (hardly useful) and a hand towel and a comb. The tiny coffee pot that Shaun had commandeered to make tea with (less than quality tea, of course) was hardly a weapon. He picked it up anyway and the hand towel and crept toward the door. 

The sickening pulse of his head made it hard to listen to the whisper-quiet motions of a body in the room, made it almost impossible to figure out where they were in the room and to guess what they might have been looking for. He leaned his left shoulder against the wall by the door and used his foot to lift the lid of the toilet and let it slam back into place. Shaun snorted in his sleep and grimaced without waking up but the person in the other room went cautiously silent.

Then footsteps worked their way across the carpet and an arm reached out to touch the half-open door. It was a man’s hand, and the cuff of a sloppy-looking white hoodie pulled halfway up his arm. There were thick-black lines of a tattoo set into his arm over the brown-leather straps of a hidden blade. 

“Oh shit,” the man said when he finally saw Malik. But it was half-a-breath too late because Malik broke the glass pot against the side of his head and the man went down hard to the floor—stopped only when his body hit the door before landing. 

Shaun was sitting up, cursing about bloody-something. Malik was shaking-shaking-falling apart as his feet slid across the floor and his body started falling. There was a divine irony in blacking out in a puddle of glass, maybe. It didn’t matter because everything was black-and-dark-and _hurting_.

\--

Altair kissed him when he opened his eyes. They were laying as they had been, with Malik on his back and Altair across his chest. But there was brilliant-blue-sky over their heads and the uncertain shift of sand at his back. 

“Again?” Malik said.

Altair kissed him again, the roughness of the glove on his hand hurtful against Malik’s skin but the softness of his lips not unwelcome. He was smirking when he moved away, as if he knew Malik would tell him that was not what he meant at all. “What a strange imagination you have,” Altair said.

“Clearly I am attempting to dissect how I feel about you,” Malik said. They were shirtless, laying in a barren nothing made up of some imaginary desert without the heat and the unforgiving glare of sun. He touched Altair’s face, traced the thickness of his lips and felt the warm-dampness of his tongue when it peaked out just enough to touch his thumb. “Of course you would use whatever means you have to confuse me.”

“Natural advantage,” Altair said, “like longer legs.”

“Were I a better man I would cut your throat and let you die in ignorance.” Malik touched his shoulder, pinched at a brown scar that sunk into his skin. Altair shifted next to him, lifted himself up so he was looming over his face. There was hurt in his eyes, caught in his eyebrows. “This world is not the one we lived in, these people are not like the people we knew.”

Altair leaned in close enough to brush their cheeks together and he said (so softly, so deeply): “Nothing is true.”

\--

Malik woke up with a start—again—in a bathtub. Shaun was gone, the towels were gone, the thick stink of shit-and-piss-and-vomit was still heavy. He crawled over the side of the tub and grasped with fumbling fingers at the soft-black pants that had been left for him. His arm was cut open in a dozen places from bits of glass and his side was scratched here-and-there. The wall was steady enough to lean against as he crept along, out of the bathroom and toward the unbearable light of the hotel room. 

“Christ,” the man sitting on the end of his bed said. Shaun was leaning over him, holding a curved needle and pair of tiny scissors. There was a wide gash just along the man’s hairline that had covered his face and shoulder in blood. In his lap there sat a folded over towel holding a pile of half-melted ice and at his feet was a bottle of clear alcohol. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Ah, yes. Now if you’d kindly stop squirming and let me—”

Malik ran out of wall at the corner and had to shuffle the last few steps on his own power. His legs made a valiant effort but he still managed to land hard on his ass just behind Shaun when they gave out. He sagged uselessly against the dresser the TV stood on. 

“I can’t believe you knocked me out,” the man said.

“Neither can I,” Shaun said. He straightened up after he tied a knot and snipped the string he was using to do stitches. “Malik,” he said down to him, “this is Desmond. Desmond, this is Malik.”

Desmond waved a hand at him. “The worst is done now,” he said, “those fuckers used the drugs on me too. They told me it was a side-effect of the Animus and that the pills would help.” He put the ice pack back on the gash on his head, “fucking Templars.” There was something distinctly familiar about his face, about the set of his jaw and the shape of his eyes.

Shaun cleared his throat as he put the needle down in his emergency medical kit. “Desmond is the one they tried to reincarnate as Altair,” he said in Arabic, “according to him he is actually a _descendant of_ Altair _and_ Ezio Auditore—poor chap. He says that he was rescued by a group of Assassins that were actually Templars and that they gave him pills for headaches they said were caused by the Animus. He escaped them, met up with real Assassins and is here to keep the Templars from getting Altair.”

“Can you believe I relived about half of Altair’s damn life and I still can’t understand a word of Arabic? It’s kind of strange seeing you though.” He nodded at Malik when he said it. 

“Do you trust him?” Malik asked Shaun (in Arabic). He caught the clothes that Shaun threw at him with a grimace of pain. The whole of his body felt weak-and-beaten and his head still felt as if it had been crushed and then scraped clean. 

Shaun was indecisive for a minute, the he shrugged. “On one hand, he is who he says he is. On the other, it’s suspicious timing for him to show up to help us just after we were assigned here.”

Desmond shifted on the bed and leaned over far enough to drop the bloody ice pack into the trashcan between Shaun’s bed and the wall. He traced the stitches on his head before dropping his hand back to his lap. 

Malik pulled on his underclothes and pants through a combination of yanking and wiggling and finally managing to lift himself up enough to get them on his waist. The effort was-exhausting and he leaned back against the dresser and closed his eyes. It-would-have-been so simple to sleep, it would have been so _simple_. His thoughts were swimming in-and-out of full consciousness. The comfort of Altair’s body against his was a warm spot in his dreams but the bare-cold press of the dresser was an unpleasant reality. “You lived his life?” Malik said.

“Yeah,” Desmond said, “parts of it—they were trying to skip straight away to where he found the Apple but the Animus wouldn’t do it, they had to go farther back.”

“When?” Malik asked. He was concentrating on breathing and getting enough energy to move his body with any amount of coordination. Without the burden of vision he could hear Shaun nervously cleaning up the bits-and-pieces of things he’d left lying around. Malik could hear the calm-and-even way Desmond was breathing. 

“Uh, well, Soloman’s Temple.”

There were demons waiting in the memories of Soloman’s Temple. Malik opened his eyes and unfolded his shirt to put it on over his head. It was a tight-fitting undershirt meant to be hidden beneath another. 

Desmond was just staring at him—openly and without fear of reproach. There was enough of Altair in his face that Malik could see how he could be mistaken for the other man. These modern people had never seen Altair; they had little to go on but drawings and statues from dubiously reliable sources.

“Why are you looking at me?” Malik asked. It took more effort than he wished to admit to for him to lift his body from the floor and make it the few short (unsteady) steps to his bed. He sat on the side of it and grabbed his bag to dig through it for a shirt. 

“Oh, sorry,” Desmond said. He rubbed his face with one hand and looked embarrassed about being caught. “Lucy and Rebecca called it the ‘bleeding effect’. It’s mainly supposed to be fighting and climbing that wears off on me but you know after you’ve been trapped in someone’s life for long enough you have trouble figuring out how you feel from how they felt. I’ll try to limit my weird.”

Shaun nodded like it made all the sense in the world to him. He even stopped packing to say, “I’ve been considering that ridiculous soul mate theory. You know the idea that ReCarns are born in sets of two and that bringing them together will cause them to regenerate memories from their first lives?”

“Well if it would work for anyone,” Desmond said.

“It’s really quite amazing even after only two days,” Shaun said. “The only trouble is trying to figure out how to expedite the process.”

“Well,” Desmond said, “putting Malik in mortal danger would be the quickest way if you really want to put your faith in the theory. But, realistically, kissing him would probably bring about some kind of reaction.”

“Why would I kiss him?” Malik asked. He had been shoving his arms into the sleeves of his shirt and doing his best to block out the bland sound of their discussion. “We were never lovers.” In so far as he knew, Altair had never been even passingly interested in the notion and Malik had never had a reason to entertain the thought (before). 

Both Desmond and Shaun were staring at him with open-mouthed shock. Shaun said, “you weren’t?” as if the idea was too preposterous to be believed. 

“Bullshit,” was Desmond’s response. “Never?”

Of course, history would have been so kind as to forget him with only the exception of being an object of Altair’s lust, mentioned only in passing on some journal pages that had been found in Italy hundreds-of-years ago. He glanced at the clock and found he still had two hours before he was expected to show up at the school. “Is he safe right now?” Malik asked.

“I’ve got Lucy watching the house,” Desmond said.

“Thomas said he had several of his Assassins watching him as well,” Shaun said.

Malik slumped sideways into the pillows.

\--

Shaun was in the shower when Malik woke up two hours later. Desmond was laying on his bed over the covers with his feet crossed at the ankles and his arms behind his head. He seemed to be sleeping at first, but he turned to look at him as soon as Malik shifted on the bed. 

Malik was groggy-and-heavy and thick-fingered as he tried to button his shirt. The dim light of the few lamps that were left turned on made his eyes hurt and his muscles felt paradoxically jelly-like and pinched from tensing. “Before you said the headaches were from the pills?”

“Yeah,” Desmond said softly. “The Templar bastards gave them to me. I guess the plan was to keep me addicted to them so they could control me because who’s going to say no to a cure to that kind of headache, you know? You probably weren’t on as high a dose as I was, I think I was unconscious for three days when Rebecca and Lucy made me detox.” 

Templars. Malik squeezed his eyes shut and tipped his head back. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Desmond again. “Why did you believe Altair and I were lovers?”

Desmond blushed, lifted his shoulders as if to shrug away the question and then decided better of it. He said (to the ceiling, not to him), “he really loved you. I had the chance to see some of his later memories, a few of the earlier ones. It’s just surprising.”

“He loved me?” Malik repeated, “as more than a brother?”

Desmond laughed at that. “He loved you in every possible way, but some of the things he thought about were not the things you think about a brother. You never guessed?”

“I was surprised he married and had children. I would have sworn he was ignorant about sex until his son was born.” He finished buttoning his shirt and leaned forward to grab socks to pull on. Desmond was watching him again, with a familiar glow caught in his eyes. “Know that I will kill any man that tries to hurt Altair. If you are not who you say you are, you will not suffer confusion about how you should feel about me for very long.”

“I’m here to keep him away from the Templars, Malik. Nobody should have to go through what they put me through—what they did to you. Rebecca and Lucy, they said they don’t know how many Templars have gotten into Assassin ranks, how far the whole thing goes. But we know that Altair is the endgame, they want him and they want the Apple.” Desmond sat up. “I’m not going to let them get either.”

“The Templars did this to me?” Malik said.

“Reincarnation started with them. They have been trying to get it right for years and then, out of nowhere the Italian Brotherhood finds and reincarnates Abbas? That is far too convenient. Rebecca thinks the Italian Mentor is one of them, and that anyone that was reincarnated in association with that Brotherhood was reincarnated by the Templars.”

( _You were only a means to an end_.)


	4. Chapter 4

\----&\----

Worry had dogged at his mother since (very nearly) the day he was born. The constant nag of it had turned half of her hair white and put a weathered-gray veneer over her skin that not even the best-and-most expensive make up could completely cover. There were creases at the edges of her mouth and in the center of her forehead from hours-and-days-and-weeks of her life she had spent in sleepless concern over him.

As soon as she saw him, she dropped her bag and clutched at his face to stare into his eyes. She was a litany of questions, “what happened, are you hurt, did you see the colors, was it a nightmare, tell me, oh—Wren, tell me what happened, baby.”

“No, I’m fine,” he said, “I’m fine.” 

But she was-his-mother touching his forehead and his wrists and worrying more lines into her face. The pictures of her before-he-was-born were so bright and hopeful and every picture of her after was one in a series documenting the progressive death of optimism. “You’re not fine.”

“Malik had a bad headache and I’m worried,” Wren said. It was the truth, minus a promise he made to a body in his dream. “I mean, he just started talking in another language and he could barely walk.”

“Oh,” she said. The worry on her face shifted from terror to matronly indulgence. “I’m sure he’s okay, sweetie. Your aunt Marcie had migraines that kept her in bed for days. They’re very unpleasant but he’ll be alright soon.”

No-but-it was more than that. Wren nodded though and smiled for her, watched her force a smile on her own face and they were altogether smiling with no sincerity what-so-ever. They made it through the evening like that, smiling through dinner and watching TV together and well-wishes for sweet-dreams.

\--

The dream came with a sudden fall of darkness just as he climbed into bed with his stomach muscles worked hot-as-fire from crunches and his arms feeling wobbly-and-weak. He was asleep in seconds with his fist on his blanket and his head only half on his pillow.

The tunnel was tar-black and silent. Wren was searching all along his body for want of a weapon and finding that he’d been stripped down to nothing but the clothes. The slow-burn of fear in his belly made it hard to think as sweat broke out on his forehead and down the center of his back. He gripped his left forearm and found it bare and the shock of finding _nothing_ where _something_ ought to have been made his breath choke in the back of his throat.

A trickle of water started behind him—sounded so very distant—and he twisted around to look through the darkness toward it. His robes swished at his legs and the hood that covered his head fell backward. 

(Not again.) 

So he ran, as fast and as hard as he could. The tunnel turned-and-twisted, he ran into walls again and again in his haste to be farther away from the sound of water. The faster he ran, the closer the water seemed to get. It came at his back, a steady stream of water that was taunting him as his boots hit solid-dry ground and his hands scraped blindly across dry walls. His heart was pounding through his chest as his lungs screamed out in starvation. 

His body hit the flat wall around a blind turn and he fell back—felt the water as he rushed over him all at once. The water was like ice, covering him in frigid-certain-death and dragging him back toward the recesses of the endless corridor he’d just escaped. Wren tried to climb to his feet but the water was pulling-and-pulling him out away from the safety of the still-dry ground. He rolled onto his belly and dug his fingers into the slippery-mud, opened his mouth and screamed.

_Malik!_

Two feet were just beyond the desperate clench of his fingers. The body moved, crouching low enough that the long tails of the robes touched the ground and were pulled back by the ebb of the wave that meant to swallow Wren. Malik was looking down at him, his left arm resting on his thigh and his right hand reaching out toward him. 

“So we've finally found something you’re afraid of.” 

Wren dug his knees and hand into the mud and threw himself forward into Malik. They fell over, landed in a circle of light, away from the cold grip of the water. Malik was-young-but-not-himself in the light. Both of his hands were on Wren’s body, holding him in place so that he wasn’t too-far or too-close. 

There was a shadow that fell across them, and Wren looked up toward it but—

\--

His shoulder hit the floor first and then his head, and he threw his hand out in a desperate attempt to stop the free-fall of his body off the edge of the bed. He caught his night stand and it tipped forward far enough to send the assorted junk that he’d collected there tumbling over him. A handful of change hit his face and it was so cold it felt-wet against his hot skin so he opened his mouth to scream and only barely managed to stop. The night stand rocked back into place with a noisy thud and Wren’s body slid off the edge of the bed with a thump. 

The clock laying upside down on the floor by his bed read 3:23. He turned his head to let the change fall off his face and rolled over to get back to his feet. The noise of footsteps in the hallway was Mother’s-panic just before she threw open his door and hit the light.

“I fell out of bed,” he said. When he stood up pennies and nickels fell off his chest. He rubbed his shoulder where he’d landed hard and looked at the tangle of his blankets with a disdainful frown. “I was sleeping really well.”

His mother sighed at him. “You always did move around so much. Even when you were a baby. I kept you in a toddler bed for two extra years because you kept falling.” She came over to look him over, winced sympathetically at his shoulder and then asked him if he was really fine. The exhausted darkness under her eyes must have been the cause of her easy acceptance of his assertion that he was fine.

When she left, he crouched in the mess and picked it up by handfuls to drop back on the nightstand before crawling back in bed. 

“I might be losing my mind,” he said to nobody.

\--

He joined the dream already in progress: footsteps in an empty corridor and his soft-soft steps following along behind them. There was a familiar liquid feeling to his body and the way he held his left arm out ever-so-slightly. He tightened his fist around hair and thought how-strange-it-was because he thought he must have had a weapon there. 

There was light around a corner and he crept into it, his eyes narrowed against the brightness as he looked around. It was a great rectangular room with a fountain at each end and a pile of cushions over a rug. Over his head was some kind of grate and beyond on it the brilliant-light of sunshine. 

The footsteps he’d been following were at his back. He tried to turn around but a hand shoved his shoulder and made him look forward. So he turned his head and got slapped for it. In the light he could see his own body clearly for the first time, the strangeness of the white robes, his gray sleeves, and the tight wind of a red sash around his waist. 

“What do you want?” he said to the body behind him. He couldn’t-see them but he could feel them, the weight of their shadow against his back. The sound of breath just bare little inches behind his neck, close enough he could feel the ghost of air tickling his hair. But no answer came. He took a step forward and the body moved with him, and another, and when he turned in a slow circle the body shuffled in a circle behind him. “Am I going crazy?”

A hand caught him by the back of his head, fisted in his hair and pushed down as the back of his knee was hit hard enough to make him fall. He landed on his knees, bent-over and staring down at the empty-space outside the corridor where Malik’s slow-decaying body was still lying. 

“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop!”

But the body shoved him down until he was laying on his belly next to the putrid corpse, until he could see-and-smell-and taste the rapid decay. He was gagging, eyes watering and hands and knees desperately seeking enough leverage to get himself away from it. 

“Stop!” he screamed again, “please.”

\--

Wren woke up with blood in his mouth and his bloody fist stuck between his teeth. He sat in the shower under the burn of hot water until it had gone tepid and then cold and only barely registered the difference. At breakfast he managed a surly thank you for the food and picked up his bag to start the long-walk to school. 

\--

Malik was in the locker room, sitting on the bench like he was ready to collapse. He was wearing the stupid-violet tee over his black-button down shirt. His whole face was pale and space all around his eyes looked blackened-and-bruised. Both of his hands were tucked under his arms and his shoulders were hanging-forward as if they had grown too-heavy overnight. 

(We must do better.)

Wren stopped at three paces. The nightmare was a bitter-taste in his mouth and a dull throb in his fist where his teeth had broken skin. A smart person (a mentally healthy person) would have walked straight away to the counselor and puked out the whole confusing mess of things on her desk. Wren might have done it too, might have gone to her crying about decaying corpses and unseen things that held him in place until he was choking on vomit and begging for freedom.

But Malik turned to look at him. He wasn’t wearing glasses today, hadn’t shaved. He smiled when he saw him but didn’t move to greet him. “Sorry if I scared you,” he said. His voice wavered when he said it, like the slight sway to his body when he tried to turn far enough to see Wren clearly. 

“I hate French too,” Wren said quietly. He moved-closer not farther-away and sat down close enough their shoulders were touching. Malik was facing one-way he was facing the-other so he could see his face and the stress around his mouth and the unhealthy brightness of his eyes. “Why are you here today?”

Malik leaned in against his body, rested his head on Wren’s shoulder. He said, “I just needed to see you.” But his voice was so light-and-so full of air. 

Wren pressed his cheek to the top of Malik’s head where his hair was coarse and stiff. He rubbed his back with one hand. “I needed to see you too,” he said, “but you shouldn’t be here.” 

Malik tipped his head, looked up at him with the most curious look on his face. He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something and decided against it. Instead he leaned against Wren harder and straightened up enough to kiss him. It wasn’t-much (not that Wren had a lot of comparison), not much more than the gentle brush of dry-on-dry lips before Malik was sagging back down and resting his head back against his shoulder. “Do you believe in soul mates?” Malik asked.

It was a ridiculous question in any circumstances. But it was absurd with the backdrop of a high-school boys locker room minutes before the first bell. The sound of slamming lockers and dirty-laughter echoed over the words and the pungent smell of deodorant, dirty socks and body spray clouded around them while they sat. Wren looked down at his awkwardly-large hands sticking out of the tight cuffs of his jacket and picked at his fingernails. 

“I believe anything is possible,” Wren said. I believe that I’m not insane. I believe I see people in shades of intent. I believe I’ve met you once before, in a different world—a hundred-thousand miles from where we are now. I believe I failed you once, that I killed you. I believe— “Do you?” 

Malik snorted at that, a quiet, exhausted, pained kind of sound. “I don’t know.”

The couch was at the door, yelling at the stranglers that were still hanging out at their lockers. He had his clipboard and whistle and a pocket through of threats about grades and attendance records. Wren turned toward the sound of his voice and listened to the sound of shuffling feet and last-minute dashes to retrieve or leave things in the lockers. The door slapped shut and the locker room was left in blissful silence. 

“We should take you to the nurse,” Wren said, “you need to go home.” 

At the words, Malik dragged himself away from Wren and nodded his head. When he stood, he wobbled on his feet and only barely straightened himself out. When his hands dropped away from his arms his sleeves pulled up enough to show the brown-leather strap across his left wrist before he tugged it down again. “I suppose,” he said.

\--

They hobbled to the nurse’s office. Malik insisted he was well enough to walk on his own but kept suspiciously close to the wall. He had either left-or-not bothered to bring his bag (the way he’d left or forgotten his glasses) but his body still sagged to one side as if weighed down by it. 

Wren stayed close enough to catch him if he fell but far enough away he wasn’t crowding too close. There was almost nobody out in the main hall as they made their way slowly toward the nurse’s office. It was stationed by the attendance office by the bus entrance, hidden around a corner as if the builders had always meant for students to get frustrated looking for the secret entrance and give up. 

Malik had to give up the stability of the wall to cross the open hall and every-step he took looked as if it took enormous effort. Wren kept a polite distance and said nothing when a hand caught his arm and a second later released him. They shuffled over to the open door to the nurse’s office and Wren stepped in first to announce their arrival. 

It wasn’t Ms. Becky (the overly cheery grandmother type nurse that was usually stationed behind the desk) but another woman he hadn’t ever seen before. Wren put his hand against Malik’s chest to stop him just out of sight. “Where’s Ms. Becky?” Wren asked.

“Sick,” the woman said. 

“Oh,” Wren said. When he _looked_ at her, all he saw was red. There was red where her skin should have been, red where her eyes should have been and a great puddle of red across the desk and floor behind it, around a narrow curve into the little room where students were invited to lay down and sleep off their troubles. There was red on the doorjamb, red on the handle, and in the distance a splatter of red against the wall. “I was supposed to tell her my Mom wanted her to come over for dinner.”

“You can come write her a note,” the woman said. There was a strange lilt in her voice, as if she were attempting to hide an accent and only barely succeeding. But she motioned at the paper and pen directly in front of her, sitting so neatly across the red glow. 

Malik’s fingers were around his wrist and Wren didn’t dare look at him because the woman seemed too focused on him to wonder what he was pushing his arm against just beyond the open door. 

Wren said, “no it’s alright. I’ll just have Mom call her.” Then he smiled politely and stepped away from the door, shoving at Malik so hard he nearly fell over. “Run,” he said and he didn’t-even-know-why. But Malik didn’t ask, just moved his feet in a clumsy-clop and followed Wren through the main hall to the cafeteria exit. There was a security guard at A hall that shouted at them to stop. Wren skidded to a halt with one hand fisted in Malik’s violet PE shirt. 

The guard was red-as-fire and frowning hard at them. “What’s happening,” Wren gasped.

“Run,” he said and dragged at Wren’s body until they were falling over together, nearly landing on their faces before they were up again and racing toward the doors. Malik pulled something out of his pocket and brought it up to his mouth to hiss a stream of words that were too-fast and too-foreign to make out.

Wren hit the exit-door hard enough to jar his whole body and Malik stumbled over the threshold and fell with a roll onto the concrete. The grip he had on Wren’s shirt dragged him down over top of him and the pair of them were a helpless tumble of limbs. 

The security guard was striding through the door with a vicious-kind-of grin over his bright-red glow. One of his hands was dropping back toward a holster on his belt. (Security guards weren’t even allowed to carry guns on school property.) 

Malik dragged Wren close enough to lay across his chest and Wren opened his mouth to scream. He didn’t hear the storm of footsteps until a boot hit the tight space by his ear, a blur of blue-light darted past him and fell into the security guard. There was a slippery-wet kind of sound as Malik struggled back up to his feet and pulled Wren after him. They were falling-over instead of running toward the silver car. 

“Go,” Malik said after he’d shoved Wren into the back seat and crawled in after him. Shaun threw what-looked-like a pen over his shoulder at Malik. It hit his shoulder and rolled off onto the seat between their bodies. 

Wren picked it up and Malik took it from him immediately, put the end of it in his mouth to pull off the top and reveal a flash of silver before he turned it over and jabbed it into Wren’s thigh. He said, “I’ll give you a free hit later,” like an apology but Wren didn’t even have time to open his mouth in objection before—

\--

The dream started in a stale gray nothing. He was dressed head-to-foot in the clothes he’d spent his life memorizing. There was a knife in his right hand and that was new-and-different. Aside from the blade on his left arm he’d used to kill Malik he hadn’t ever been _armed_. 

“We’ve always had nightmares,” the body at his back said. “He gave it to you so you could protect yourself.”

Wren was six-foot-one, taller than half of the kids in his class, taller than his mother, taller than Malik, taller than some of his teachers but he felt short-and-small in his dreams. The body behind him couldn’t have been much different in size than him, couldn’t have been as tall or broad as it _felt_ like. But he still clenched his hand tighter around the knife and shivered. “Who gave it to me?”

“Malik.” The voice was amused-at-him for being an idiot. Who else could it have possibly been? 

“What do I have to protect myself from?” Wren whispered.

Then a hand fisted in his robe and pulled him back in a sharp-stab of pain in his chest. He wanted to scream but there was a hand over his mouth. 

\--

Wren woke up screaming. His right hand clenched _hard_ on the hilt of a knife that was a few spare inches away from his face as he jerked away from the dream and very-nearly stabbed himself in the throat. There was a hand over his attached to someone he didn’t recognize that was staring at him with such open awe-and-concern that Wren instantly jerked away from him. But he was laying on his side on a bed and there was another body at his back when he tried to move away.

“Hey, it’s okay,” the man next to the bed said.

Wren tried to look at him—look at his color, at his intent—but his heart was beating like it meant to drive itself through his chest. He felt sick-to-his-stomach with a burning pain at his back where he’d been stabbed in his dream. “Who are you!” he screamed.

An arm wrapped around his chest and it was only the hand on his right wrist that kept him from stabbing it. Malik was mumbling something at the nape of his neck, folding his smaller body in against Wren’s back as his hand pressed across his fast-beating heart. “Calm down,” he mumbled, “just calm down.”

“Let me go,” Wren snapped at the man holding his hand. The man didn’t look at him but behind him and then released his wrist. Wren rolled over, wiggled and squirmed until he was facing Malik. “Tell me what the fuck is going on right now,” he said. Even his voice was _vibrating_.

Malik didn’t look ashen-and-gray anymore. There was color back in his face, energy evident in his eyes and the easy way moved to prop his head up on his hand as he looked down at him with such pity. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. 

“What?” Wren demanded. He was still holding the knife, tightening his fingers until he thought they were going to lose feeling. 

“Why didn’t you tell me that you loved me?” Malik asked. Like it mattered, like it even made _sense_ set against being attacked and kidnapped and (apparently) drugged. 

“Because I don’t!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Malik repeated.

“You’re insane.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Wren shoved himself backward so he was falling off the bed in a graceless heap of limbs. It took him a minute to right himself and take stock of the room around him. There were two beds and a dresser with a TV sitting on top of it. There was an empty trashcan and a conspicuous absence of _things_. Hotel rooms were always full of things left by the people that stayed but there no things in this room. “How about I ask you why the hell I’m here? Or who the hell you are? Because I was doing just fine until you came!”

Malik got to his feet on the bed without so much as a wobble, and stepped forward twice before he was stepping off the edge and hitting the floor. The other man in the room was looking back and forth between them with morbid intensity. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Malik repeated.

Wren took another step back and another—looked over his shoulder at the door and turned toward it to run. He yanked it open and didn’t even have time to almost get it shut before Malik was slipping through it and slamming into his body. They fell in a tumble in the middle of the narrow hallway. “Get off me,” Wren said. He brought the knife up to scare Malik away and had it easily knocked out of his grasp.

“Why didn’t you tell me!” Malik shouted at him. He was pinning him down by the shoulders with furious red-spots on his cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me that you loved me?”

His-head felt like it was going-to-cave in and his heart felt like it was going to tear out of his chest. The pain in his back was like a hole had been ripped into him and the sheer-white panic that had followed him through every-dream he’d ever-had in the whole of his life was suddenly so bright and brilliant that his vision started to tunnel into little pinpoints of light.

Malik’s fists were in his clothes and he was shouting, “why didn’t you tell me damn it!”

“Because I killed your brother!” Wren screamed at him. “Because I cost you your arm. Why would you care what I felt? Why would I embarrass myself by admitting it?” He read once, not so long ago, that the worst part of drowning was holding your breath. Once you let the water in, everything was euphoric. It felt like that, on his back in the hallway, as if the panic and dread that had invaded his dreams for as long as he could remember was gone and a numb feeling of calm certainty replaced it. 

Wren was going to die.

Malik let him go and sat back against his heels, looming over his body with a wounded look on his face. He shifted his weight to the side and fell into the empty space next to Wren. For a moment he said nothing, just looked down at the knife laying between their bodies, and then he cleared his throat. “I am sorry, Wren.”

Now that he was listening, now that his body had given in to the inevitable, Wren let out a half-laugh. “You’re speaking Arabic.”

“Yes,” Malik said. “I have been all day.” But he looked so terribly sad about it. 

When he was younger, alone and frightened and forced into rooms with doctors that tried to turn him inside out, Wren had been convinced the very worst thing in the world was the idea that he could be _unmade_. The doctors had tried, for years they hounded him into accepting his ‘illness’. It had been a fabulous charade he played, a game that he’d invented in his room to keep the parts of himself they said were make-believe. Now he was crawling to his knees in a musty hotel hallway, slipping between Malik’s open knees and thinking that the very most terrifying thing in the world wasn’t being unmade but the parts of him he’d tried so hard to save. The thing in his head, the one that had filled his nightmares for years, it was going to bleed him out until there was nothing left. “Who is he?” he asked

“His name is Altair Ibn-La’Ahad. He was born in 1165. He and I were boys together at Masyaf.” Malik picked up the knife and handed it back to him. (You will need it to protect yourself.) He shifted how he was sitting against the wall, leaned farther to the right than left and licked his lips before he spoke again. “This world is uglier than when we left it.”

Wren considered it, let it wash through the calm that was making his head heavy and hands sluggish. He held the knife loosely in one hand and put his other on Malik’s knee. “Did you love him? If he had told you what would you have done?”

Malik said, “I would have laughed at him. I would have belittled him. Our lives were a series of fresh wounds with very little time to heal.” He was looking right at Wren, looking through him, looking for the other-him that he had known hundreds of years ago. “Yes, I do love him.”

Of course he did. “He’s killing me to get back to you,” Wren said.

“I know,” Malik said.

\----&\----

Desmond had met them back at the hotel after he fled the scene and navigated his way through side-streets and empty lots. He’d met up with his friends to change clothes before he came back to find them. Shaun had emptied the hotel room by then, leaving nothing at all behind save for Wren’s peaceful sleeping body and Malik trying to shake off the last of the stupor.

“I talked to Rebecca,” Desmond said when he came in the room. Shaun interrupted him just long enough to announce he was going to ditch the car. Then Desmond was saying, “she says that if you can get Altair to ‘break through’ that the Reincarnation Process will be easier and quicker. I don’t remember anything about ‘easy or quick’ when they were trying to shove someone else’s life into my skull but she believes she’s right and she’s smarter than me.”

“He understands Arabic,” Malik had said. Because he’d said ‘I just needed to see you’ in Arabic to hide the pathetic truth of it and Wren had sat at his side and answered him. He didn’t even seem to realize that Malik wasn’t speaking English, didn’t register it as strange. “What sort of break through does she want?”

“He needs to say or do something that only Altair would know to say or do. Clearly the kid is already on his way to regaining latent memories. Also Lucy said the Templars took his house this morning, she told me it wasn’t a pretty sight.”

\--

Shaun came back when Wren was still staring at him with pinked-rimmed eyes and the deep and painful certainty of his own inevitable death. His loose fist was holding the knife mere inches from Malik’s belly and his other hand was resting comfortably-against the inside of his knee. “Oh,” Shaun said, “what’s this then?”

Desmond came out of the room and closed the door behind him. “You ditched the car?”

“No, I rode it around town and stopped to have a bite then drove it back here because clearly I am an imbecile.” Shaun threw his hands up in exasperation and then motioned toward Desmond. “We’re all waiting for you.”

“What are we doing with him?” Desmond asked. There was no forgiveness in the words, because there simply was no alternative to escorting Wren to his death. The only options they still had was whether they would have to use force or not. 

Malik sighed and pushed his back against the wall to slide back up and to his feet without making Wren move. “Do you want to go back to sleep?” Malik asked, “do you want to see where you’re going?” 

The shark-eyed blonde woman hadn’t been kind enough to give Amir the choice between slipping away in his sleep and being strapped down on an execution table. Abbas had made a point to remove the option before he ordered Malik's head removed from his body. Shaun had told him once that Altair had chosen the place of his death and that he’d passed in peace (as far as they knew). It seemed preferable, really. 

“Does it matter if I’m going to die either way?” Wren asked. He stood up on wobbling legs and fumbled at the knife in his grip. There were tears on his face (at last) but the blank-numbness of shock was keeping him docile and steady. Behind his back Shaun was holding out another thin-pen full of sedatives. 

Desmond was looking at his shoes and Shaun was staring at the wrinkles on Wren’s back as if they were a treasure map. Malik reached around Wren to get the syringe and held it up so that he could see it. Then he stepped forward and put his arms around Wren, felt the way his body started to shake and the clumsy-grip of his hands at Malik’s back. His voice was bubbling up in his throat with choked-sounding sobs as he pressed his face against Malik’s shoulder. 

“Don’t let him hurt me,” Wren said, “I just don’t want it to hurt. I’m so scared.” 

Malik hummed a gentle-calming sound to him. He said, “go swiftly and easily and do not be afraid.” Then he flipped the cap off the syringe and stabbed it into the fleshy part of Wren’s hip. 

\--

Desmond carried Wren because his limbs were long-and-awkward as they hung loosely away from his body. They made their way through the hotel, down the steps and out through the back entrance to where the car Desmond brought was waiting. Malik sat in the back with Wren’s unconscious body and Desmond sat in the front to give Shaun the directions. 

“What did he mean ‘don’t let him hurt me?’ Was he talking about Altair?” Shaun asked. They were easing their way through traffic, away from midtown toward the more affluent neighborhoods. Desmond told them that Rebecca had managed to find an abandoned house with ‘a thousand rooms’ that still had running water and power. According to her it was in the midst of being sold as soon as the prospective buyers and current owners worked out the price. 

Abandoned, she said, likely to remain untouched. 

“He said Altair was killing him to get back to me,” Malik said. The idea was made of the same insanity as waking up in the modern world had been. Except that Malik had never had the chance to meet Amir, had known nothing of the boy save for the scars he wore now on his arms and chest from how desperately the boy had struggled to save his life.

\--

They found the house, Shaun left them to carry Wren inside and up the stairs to the second floor all the way in the back where a short-ish woman with short-dark hair was growling at a spread of computer monitors next to what he assumed was an Animus. She turned around when they came in the room and looked immensely confused, “where’s Lucy?”

Desmond sat Wren in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest with his hands tucked in so they didn’t flop away. He was out-of-breath from exertion when he said, “we didn’t see her. You have this thing ready to go?”

“Baby is already ready to go,” Rebecca said. She turned around to look at Malik and went kind of pink-and-white at the same time. Her face was torn between awe, shock and giddiness as she took a step toward him and held out her hand. “It is actually a complete honor to meet you.” 

Malik didn’t shake her hand, “this needs to happen. They are coming and he’s defenseless.” 

Rebecca nodded, “right, of course.”

“I’m going to go find Lucy,” Desmond said. He moved away from the Animus and all but ran through the door in sudden haste. His footsteps echoed dully back down the hallway as he retreated and left Malik alone with Rebecca. 

“I can’t blame him,” Rebecca said, “he was in some sorry shape when he got him out. Imagine what happened to you only compound it by a complete mental breakdown. They weren’t trying to wake him up as much as force him to be someone else. You can just imagine what that does to a body.” She was tapping on her keyboard while she talked, leaning across to touch buttons on the animus and got up once readjust Wren’s body. 

“How long will this take?” Malik asked.

“Well, for a complete Reincarnation, days is the generally accepted method. After what happened with you and a few less fortunate bastards, Abstergo changed their methodology. They decided to keep the bastards sedated and bring them back slowly. As far as I know, I have the only working Animus outside of Abstergo and I’ve done two Reincarnations both of them on people that were vaguely aware of their past. One was this really funny Chinese Assassin.”

Malik glared at her.

Rebecca cut off in mid grin and said, “I don’t know. Altair’s been breaking through. Desmond told me that Wren has fully developed eagle vision and that’s not something you just have, it’s something you have to learn. So, how long it takes kind of depends on what Wren already knew, how much and how close to the surface what he knew is.” She shrugged in a way that wasn’t repentant in the slightest, “I wish I had a better answer but I don’t.”

Malik looked around the room for another chair and dragged it over to sit five-foot-away from the Animus where he could see it and the door and the window that had been covered with a heavy-dark towel. 

\--

“Is it really awful?” Rebecca asked him after a time. She had been sitting quietly in front of her screens, humming at whatever she saw and tapping keys here-and-there. 

Malik had gone soupy with drowsiness, caught up in the comfortable drone of electricity the Animus gave off and the predictable pattern of breathing from the other two bodies in the room. He pushed his foot against the floor to straighten in the chair and cleared his throat. “What?”

“Being here,” she said. The words weren’t small or quiet but they were vulnerable nonetheless. 

“You are young,” he said. “You believe in what you are doing, you have so much left to give, and so much left to lose to this war. I am an old man. I have given all I want to give and have lost all I wish to lose. But here I am, once more.”

“But what the Templars are doing—it’s going to change the whole face of the planet. If they get what they want—if they find the Apple before we do, its game over. They’ll be nobody left to fight.” She turned in her chair to look at him, both of her feet planted against the floor and her hands gesturing upward toward the sky as if it meant something.

Malik snorted at that, at the urgency of her words and the desperation that was so evident on her face. Oh-and-the way her face transformed from worry to pure fury made him bite back a smirk. “Do not be so naïve,” he said. “There was a time in my life when I felt the same as you. One day, you’ll understand this war will never end. Our children’s children will fight this same war. They will lose battles as we’ve lost. They will die as we’ve died. And the war will simply go on—unchanged.”

“But you’ve seen what the Apple can do,” Rebecca said.

“Oh yes,” Malik said. “You forget that not all were overtaken by it. There will always be one that can fight, and if there is one—there will be more.” 

The screen beeped at her and Rebecca turned back to look at it with a frown. She tapped a few keys and frowned all the harder before leaning forward enough to put her fingers over Altair’s pulse. 

There were footsteps in the hallway and a quiet hush of voices that drew closer. They were arguing, caught up in a disagreement that came to a pause just outside of the closed door. Malik couldn’t make out the words at his current distance but he could understand the placating tone as Desmond offered some manner of reassurance before the door opened. 

“How is it going, Rebecca?” he asked. He let go of the door and took a step into the room, walking on quick-quiet feet. Just behind him, half hidden by his body, was a slender-blonde woman with her head ducked indecisively against her chest. “You have any idea how much longer?”

“No,” Rebecca said, “hey, Lucy—come look at this.”

Lucy took a step forward from where she’d slunk into the room behind Desmond. Malik had a clear view of her then—the familiar stature of her body, the familiar tone of her skin and the shape of her face. She didn’t look at the screen but squared her shoulders and planted her feet and looked right at him. Oh-and-he would have known her _anywhere_ , he would have been able to pick her out of a crowd of thousands because her eyes were as dead and blank as a shark’s and her mouth was scowling-now but she had smiled right in his face when she promised him how _kindly_ they would treat him.

Moving was a reflex, something done without thought. He was on his feet with the chair clattering behind him and his hands slamming into her body. She wore tight-fitting clothes but he caught at them until he had a grip and threw her into a wall. There was an excitement of shouts at his back but her face was pink-with-shock and her lips were curled-up with a smile as she looked up at him from where she hit the ground. 

She knocked his feet out from under him and he only barely managed to catch himself from landing hard-and-wrong before he was grabbing at her ankle as she fought to get back to her feet. She screamed when he dragged her down and pinned her under him. It was his hand on her white-throat leaving bruise-marks and his left arm pulling back as he activated the mechanism that controlled the hidden blade. There wasn’t even fear in her face as she looked at him but the same deadened contempt. 

He didn’t see the knife in her hand until it was seconds-too-late and he only barely had the time to pull away. She growled at missing the fatal wound but followed after him to slash at his upper left arm. It went easily through is clothes and into his skin and he cursed at the sharp-wet sting of pain. Lucy took advantage of his distraction to smash the hilt of the knife against his temple and he crumpled to the side with her following right after him. 

Desmond was shouting something, barely visible through the darkening haze of Malik’s vision as he moved to drag Lucy away. Rebecca was saying something too, and then there was a high-pitched wail of alarm. Lucy was leaning over him with the knife tight in her fist and her teeth white-and-bare. 

“I don’t—” she started to say. But her words were cut off by a well-aimed kick to her chest that sent her sprawling off him into the close-by wall. Her scream of pain-and-surprise was counterpoint to the metallic clang of the knife dropping. She was clutching her ribs, scrambling to get her breath-and-bearings back as Altair grabbed her by the arm and wrenched up to her feet and slammed her against the wall. He held her in place with his forearm across her throat. 

Malik groaned at the pain in his head, looked toward the sound of the siren going off still and saw Desmond on the ground coughing blood into his hand and Rebecca hiding behind her chair with wide-open eyes and a gray-pallor of fear in her cheeks. There was a wash of darkness falling over his vision in time with the pulse of pain coming from the swollen-broken skin over his temple. 

(Stay conscious.)


	5. Chapter 5

\----&\----

Wren was only a child trapped inside a body that Altair had when he was a man. In some ways, Altair felt a deep pity for the child. He had never been free to live a life that was wholly his own, but trapped in some in-between life-and-hell where incomplete memories transmuted into terrible nightmares. Wren had not been aware of him long—hadn’t ever seen him in the darkened corridor of his only dream—but Altair had sat in silence and watched years pass in an infinity of repeating nightmares. They might have gone on in the same way, trapped in an unsatisfying cycle, if not for Malik showing up in high school Phys Ed looking imprecisely like the young man he had been so-very-long ago.

“I thought you’d be a monster,” was what Wren said when he finally turned to look at Altair. These dark dreams were always Wren’s (not his) to control. He was nothing but a child, dressed in his child’s clothes, looking at Altair with the placid-whiteness of shock. In the real world, outside of this, he had been poisoned with something that dulled him. Every sound-and-every motion of his dream-self was muted and slow. “You look just like me.” Wren reached out to touch him, pushed two of his fingers hard against his chest and made a noise at finding him solid. “You’re a killer.”

“Yes,” Altair said.

“Are you good at it?” Wren asked. He wasn’t brave-but-fading away. There wasn’t enough left of him to feel mortal fear, just enough to make him waver like a bit of light. The grayness around them was changing as Wren slipped away, filling in with the details that only Altair remembered—nicks in the walls, the pattern of stains across the floor, the familiar smell of sand and parchment. “You must be.”

“I am,” Altair said. 

“Why did you kill Malik’s brother?” Wren was only a reflection now, made of air and the last catch of light before the fall of darkness. His voice was reedy-and-thin as it faded out. 

“I believed in the wrong man,” Altair said, “he used me and I allowed it. I filled myself with the certainty that I was better, faster and stronger than I was until there was nobody that could make me see reason. And Kadar died because of it.” But Wren was gone.

\--

Awareness came by degrees—the unfamiliar smell of wood polish and plaster. The unfamiliar sounds of electricity and monitors. The grainy half-vision as he tried to open his eyes. Altair had been passing years in semi-consciousness, taking in catches-and-slips of this world that he’d been reborn in but the full-reality of it was still _overwhelming_.

Malik.

He heard Malik’s grunt of effort, heard the shock of fists-on-bone and it rocked him out of a stupor. His body was unfamiliar to him with its youth and his visions swam with vertigo as he stood up. The world was out of focus around him, nothing but abstract shapes that looked nothing at all like real things. Everything felt distant and dim—nothing was distinct from another—and there was such a shrill sound (like an alarm) that it felt as if something were stabbing through his skull.

He lurched forward, knocked into a body that pushed back against his. Malik made a wounded sound and Altair closed his eyes and pushed the heels of his hands hard against them. White-and-red spots popped up behind his eyelids that stayed floating in his vision when he opened his eyes again. Things made more sense—this body against his was a man’s grabbing at his arm to hold him back and saying something to him in a jumble of sounds that must have been words. Altair elbowed him hard in the chest and punched his face, heard him go down and nearly fell with him when there was nothing to lean his own weight against.

Malik was on the ground under a woman holding a knife. Altair kicked her in the chest, followed her when she fell and pulled her up to slam against the wall. She was bright-with fear when he jammed his arm across her windpipe. Behind his back, Malik was wheezing a curse of pain, and the man he’d hit was coughing blood onto the floor.

Altair stared at the woman kicking her feet and clawing at his arm and chest and face to gain her freedom. His body was buzzing but he couldn’t feel it—not really, not the way he should have been able to. He watched the color in her cheeks change, watched how her eyes started to bulge in their sockets. She was drawing blood with her fingernails, clawing at whatever skin she could get to and he knocked her hand away from his face. She was going limp now, still struggling but fading out. 

There were voices behind him, those words that made no sense to him repeating-and-repeating over the siren-shrill sound. “Let her go,” Malik said. His hand touched Altair’s arm and pulled at him. Altair wanted to tell him how the woman had meant to kill him, how she was a threat and therefore should be handled with deadly-efficient force but his body folded as soon as Malik tugged at him. He went down gracelessly, and Malik went with him, trying to temper their fall and doing little but hitting the ground first. 

\--

The second time Altair woke up, it was dark in the room save for the pleasant dim glow of a computer screen. A woman was sleeping with her head resting on her crossed arms against a table. The sound of her breathing was an audible snore that drowned out the sound of the machinery in the room. The floor was cold under his bare feet when he pulled himself free and got to his feet. His body felt light-and-young in a way he couldn’t recall with any precise detail. It moved without ache or objection: his limbs were lithe and strong again. He pressed his hands against his own chest and arms and probed at the tense muscle that he found there.

In so far as strange awakenings went, being propelled into youthful body wasn’t the worst of all possible fates. He crept along the floor on quiet feet, feeling with his outstretched hand in the darkness. The woman at the table mumbled in her sleep and shifted around before resettling in place. Altair looked over his shoulder to be sure of her position and then found the doorknob in the dimness to pull the door open. 

The shock of light from the hall was enough to blind him. He only barely contained the jerk of surprise, and very nearly missed the blur of motion that came from an open door just a few feet away. There were blurry spots in his vision as he darted forward and caught this new person by the shirt front. He shoved him bodily against the wall. “Who are you?” he demanded. But the sound of his own voice was _wrong_. All of the words were exactly-as-he-remembered, as he expected-them-to-be but the _sound_ of it was all wrong. 

“Shaun Hastings,” the man said. “I can take you to Malik if you’d be so kind as to release me.” He was white-as-snow beneath his pale skin. His hands were raised in clear surrender and even if they hadn’t been he felt like nothing but sweater-stretched over bone. There was no substance to him to pose a clear threat. Altair leaned away from him and caught his shirt by the collar to shove him forward. “Ok, I’ll just go first then.” He took a step forward and Altair mirrored the step behind him.

So they made their way through a hallway to staircase. 

“Do you know where you are?” Shaun asked.

“Malik,” he said. Altair remembered the woman, remembered her body over Malik’s, and remembered the knife in her hand. He remembered her face when she was sure that she was going to die and the brief-and-terrible relief that she had looked at him with. Altair had killed many people in his life but so very few of them had ever looked _relieved_. 

“Not the chatty type.” Shaun took him down the stairs and to the left, toward a puddle of light in the back of the house. There was a man at a counter in the kitchen sullenly chewing while he stared into a greasy-looking tin dish. When Shaun tripped over the threshold between the hall-and-kitchen the man jerked up to look at them. “Its fine, Desmond,” Shaun said. “We’re just going to see Malik.”

Desmond didn’t relax at the words but shifted his body into a defensive posture. It was bitterly-familiar and still sloppy enough that it was hardly a true threat. Altair pulled Shaun so that he was a barrier between Desmond and him. “He’s out there,” Desmond said.

Shaun had to shuffle sideways to move them through the kitchen and into the narrow room that stood adjacent to it. Altair twisted his hand in Shaun’s collar as the man leaned to the side to grab the doorknob of the large wooden door at the back of the house and pull it open. There was no light in the yard except the dim shine of streetlights from the front of the house and the even dimmer glow of stars. Shaun eased them through the doorway with his fingertips just barely managing to hold the screen door from closing on them.

“Let him go,” Malik said. He was sitting on a stool by the back of the house, arms crossed over his chest and legs stretched out in front of him. 

Altair shoved Shaun to the right, back toward the house and moved past him. It was easy to move quickly in this body, easy to make it do the things that had become difficult for him. He found himself stumbling in the last footsteps before he fell into Malik’s body. They were both knocked to the ground and it was foolishness-worthy-of-children but it didn’t stop him from wrapping both of his arms around him. He fisted at Malik’s clothes and pressed his face against the safe-and-solid weight of his living-body. 

Malik’s hands rested against his back, his breath came as a sorry-little-sigh. The young man he sounded-like, looked-like, felt-like would have gone red in the face and breathless with screaming objections at the boy-Altair-looked like. But he said, “I have missed you too.” His hands rubbed at his back and threaded through the length of his hair to stroke the nape of his neck. 

\--

There was a confusing jumble of things in Altair’s head. The things that made-sense set in sharp contrast against the things-that-did-not. Only yesterday he had been alone in death and only this morning he had been dreaming of a strange-future. 

It was the darkest part of night and he found himself trailing behind Malik through an empty-barren house, around and up and into a bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror and tried to make sense of the man he saw against the man he remembered-being. 

“The disorientation does not last long,” Malik said. He was pulling his clothes off behind him, easily stripping off the jacket and the shirt with a dozen little buttons down the front. His left arm was bloody when he pulled the shirt away and the scab that had formed came with it. But his left arm was whole and present. 

Altair turned around to look at him. Before he could think better of it, he found himself reaching out to touch Malik, to wrap his hands around his arm and squeeze it. And Malik allowed it even as he looked up at him as if he pitied the idiot that Altair had turned out to be. 

“As strange as it may seem to you, it is infinitely stranger to me.” Malik pulled his hand free and sat on the toilet to pull his shoes and socks off. There was something wrong with his voice too—different and more pronounced than the wrongness of Altair’s voice. There were other things too—the way his body was still thin and wiry. Malik had pushed himself to the point of exhaustion every-single day when they were boys. This body that he wore was not the body he had had even at the age they must have been. (And what was it? Eighteen?) His shoulders had been thick with muscles, his arms had been heavy with them. And his hands had been worn with many calluses from hours-and-hours and years of training. 

He had gotten heavier with age. His hair had gone gray early. There had been far more hair on his body.

The scars that Altair knew were gone, the ones he had given him—the ones he had tended in the aftermath of battle. There should have been a long white stripe across his chest that Altair had only been able to tend to after Malik collapsed from exhaustion. He remembered the dark shiver of the cold air as he dragged Malik’s unmoving body to the fragile safety of a temporary shelter. There had been sparse light and little water to clean the wound. His own hands had been thick-and-fumbling from the chill of the air and too many hours without sleep as he stripped Malik enough to scrub his wound clean to prevent infection.

This Altair remembered, and yet it was not there. In its place there were pale little slivers of new scars up and down his chest and across the outsides of his arms. Altair rubbed his thumb across one as Malik started the water in the shower. 

“Have you satisfied your curiosity?” Malik asked. His skin was turning to gooseflesh under Altair’s hands and there was a decidedly pink heat to his cheeks that could not be attributed to the fresh waft of steam coming off the water in the shower. “I am whole. I am real.”

Altair nodded and stepped back, turned his attention back to the mirror and his own face reflecting in it. His hair was longer than he liked and his face was ridiculous with youth but it was his face. He touched his own cheek and nose and the space on his mouth where his scar had once been. There were fresh pink scratches from where the woman had clawed him to save her own life. Here-and-there on his face and along the side of his neck, one of them that went under the collar of his thin T-shirt. 

His hands were paler than he remembered but then Wren had not made a habit out of spending many hours of his day out in the sun training to find-and-kill targets. He had spent his time in the closed confines of rooms with doors and shuttered windows. His skin had gone pale from lack of sunlight. 

Malik stepped into the shower behind him and Altair turned to watch him. He had his head tipped back into the spray of the water, mouth open and eyes closed. His arms were hanging at his side and his body seemed to relax in place as the warm water coursed over him. The blood on his arm was washing away, dripping as pink rain against the bright-white tub. Altair pulled his own shirt off and dropped it on the floor. He stepped out of his pants as he crossed the distance to the tub.

Malik opened his eyes when Altair climbed into the tub next to him. “I see you never managed to learn any patience.” 

Altair touched Malik’s throat—ran his finger down from his jaw to his collarbone and then across from one pulse to the other. In all the years of his life after, he had never forgotten the brutal spread of blood or the ragged edge of torn skin and broken bone where Malik’s neck had been cut away from his body. It welled up in his chest so bright-and-bloody and painful that he couldn’t stop the ragged sob that cracked in the air loud enough it made Malik’s flinch. 

“I’m sorry,” Altair said, “I’m sorry.” With both of his hands resting against Malik’s sturdy-and-sure shoulders, with both of his thumbs pressed against his neck feeling the heat-of-skin and the steady throb-of-his-pulse. 

Malik’s hand was on wrist, and his arm was pulling Altair closer to hug him. “My death was never your fault,” Malik said. 

\--

They found a place to sleep in another empty room. The ‘bed’ was nothing but a few thick blankets thrown against a wall with their arms as cushions and the comforting presence of another warm body. Malik had dressed in fresh clothes that had little pocket sheathes for his knives. Altair wore the clothes that Malik-said Shaun-brought for him and held the knife that Malik offered him.

“Why are we here?” he asked when the feeling of floating across the surface of _reality_ made him feel queasy-and-sick. 

It was too dark to see Malik, but he could feel the way his body tensed and heart the irritated shift of his body. “We are here because the Templars want you.”

“What of you?” Altair asked. 

Malik snorted lightly at that. “I am merely the lure meant to catch you. Sleep now, there will be time for questions later.”

When they were young, Malik had made a life out of trying to best him and Altair had gotten bitter satisfaction from defeating his every attempt. Everything they did in the company of each other had been a challenge from training-to-dressing and even sleeping. Malik had been ragged with exhaustion sitting propped up by a wall with his eyes in angry narrow slits glaring at Altair as if he could will him to sleep first. Altair had taken up the habit of humming to annoy him and discovered-by-happy-chance that he could hum lullabies to himself and put Malik to sleep.

It was a small comfort in this strange new world, that Malik could still be lulled into sleep so easily. Altair lifted himself out of the blankets and slipped away on silent-socked-feet through the cracked-open door and into the great-empty house beyond it. 

\--

Desmond was in the dark front room when Altair found him. His body gave off a faint blue-aura set over the defensive posture of a man who was aware of how out-matched he was. Unlike Shaun who had no substance to his body and no will to test himself, Desmond would not be bested without a fight. 

“Where is the woman?” Altair asked.

“Not here,” Desmond said. “I told Malik, Lucy is not a Templar. She was working at the Abstergo lab that resurrected him because she was sent there as a spy and told to send information about what they were doing out. She saved Malik’s life and she saved my life.” And-I-love-her. 

Altair considered it, took a step forward and watched Desmond take a step to the side to give himself a chance to fight-or-flee. It was an interesting motion, not one as unpracticed as Desmond presented himself to be. “She’s lying to you,” Altair said, because he had seen life funneling out of her eyes and she had been _relieved_ that it was ending-at-last. “She is not my concern unless she hurts what is mine. I will speak with Malik so that he knows she is not our concern. Tell her that.” He looked at Desmond’s shoes and then at his own bare feet and considered the cold that was creeping in through the walls. 

“She’s not lying,” Desmond said. “Lucy is on our side.” 

\--

Shaun Hastings (as he called himself) was sitting in a small room at the end of the downstairs hall. He was blinking blurrily into a brightly-lit computer screen with a cold cup of tea resting unsteadily against the carpet at his side. His back was against the wall so that he could see the door easily when it opened but from the way he had to rub his eyes, he clearly could not see far enough in the darkness to be sure who Altair was.

“You are the scholar,” Altair said. 

“A historian, yes.” Shaun set the computer to the side and picked up his wobbly cup of tea as he stretched his legs out in front of him. “You are doing far better than any of the others have done. Malik wasn’t so—” he motioned at Altair up and down like he couldn’t figure out what he meant to say, “coherent and mobile for weeks.”

Altair moved closer to him, lowered himself so he was sitting cross-legged across from him. “If you tell me anything that is not true I will not hesitate to hurt you.” 

“Charming.” For a pale-white Englishman, Shaun’s Arabic was surprisingly good.

“Tell me what has happened. Start with Malik, leave nothing out.”

\--

The air was dry with chill and filled with the many-smells of modern life. So early in the morning, the streets had gone all but silent with only one-or-two spare cars moving sluggishly along. He passed blackened windows and closed-up store fronts as he walked. The coat that he’d taken was too large on his narrow shoulders; it shifted around as he moved and made slick-slipping sounds that sounded impossibly loud in the quiet.

There were many-many things in his head now. More than there had been in the closed room with only Malik-and-walls to concentrate on. It was easy to fall into thoughts of Malik, to let himself drown in the guilt-and-regret that he’d kept so close to his heart even in death. But his life was not made up of only one man. Out here, his head was full of many-many things that crashed about in chaotic remembering as he walked. 

He wondered, in the brief catches of conscious thought couched between great rambling memories, what Maria might have said about where he now found himself. He thought of her face as it had been in the grainy-golden days of his memory. When her hair was dark and her skin was supple and she was young-and-still falling in love with him. She had held him with fingernails in his skin and hissed her ownership into his ears, swore to him she’d spill the blood of any man-or-woman that dared to challenge her. 

“What do I do?” he asked the nothing of his thoughts. He tried to find Maria’s voice in them, tried to picture her face the way her hands rested against her hips and the exact tilt of her face in exasperation. He searched for the way her skin felt and the comforting press of her against-him. 

But there was a tumble-slip colliding fall of so-many-things in his head. An entire lifetime fighting for a place in the forefront of his mind, knocking against the things that were solid-and-real.

\--

The sun had risen by the time Altair found Wren’s house. It looked back at him as he looked at it as if asking why-and-how he had come to be there. Altair wrapped his hand around the knife in his pocket and walked up to the front porch. There were red drops of blood soaked into the wood-and-grass visible only when he stopped and looked for the sick-red-glow of them. The door knob was soaked in red and there were speckles of it all over the front door and the threshold beneath it. 

The door opened easily, the interior of the house was bright with lamp light and smelled like the apple cinnamon candles that Wren’s mother so preferred. In the distance, a radio was playing some obnoxious early-morning 80’s dance mix and up the stairs, Wren’s alarm was buzzing unanswered. 

Altair stepped inside and pushed the door closed with the tips of his fingers. It was easy to pick up the blood trail, up the stairs and around the corner to the Mother’s room, around the bed by the far wall. Her body was in a mutilated heap—face down to the floor. Her limbs had gone rigid in death and her blood had dried in sticky patches. 

Wren’s room had been ransacked. Everything had been thrown on the floor, the bed had been turned over. His clothes were everywhere and his posters had been ripped down and left lying on the ground. 

Altair went back down stairs, stood in the living room where Wren had often taken refuge from the nightmares. He had been closest to the surface then—glimpsing life in this future through Wren’s dreary-tired eyes on this couch. He left the living room to walk through the kitchen, back to the door that led to the narrow back yard, stopping only long enough to pick up the bat from the basket by the door.

Wren had learned to play baseball in the yard. He had grown from a fat-legged toddler to a boy in this yard, chased after bugs and birds and other boys in this yard. This was where he hid from his Mother when she nagged him about his dreams. This was where he had climbed the low branches of the trees and looked over his neighborhood and thought long-and-hard about sanity.

“Wren?” 

Altair smiled into the golden-gleam of sunshine on his face. He let it slip away before he turned around—tried to look shocked and scared when he faced the man with two cautious hands outstretched. He was glowing red-as-fire with old blood caught between his fingers. There was a black Templar cross tattooed over the right side of his neck. 

“I’m detective Harris,” the man said, “we’ve been worried about you, son. Have you been in the house?”

Altair nodded. The man took another step closer and was too busy selling his lies to a child to pay any attention to the way Altair shifted his grip on the weight of the aluminum bat in his hand. He couldn’t manage to get tears in his eyes but he must have been convincingly frightened because Harris’ face looked oh-so-concerned about him. 

The man was almost close enough to get his fingers on him when Altair swung the bat. It caught him hard-off-guard and sent him flying to the side. He let out a yelp like a curse and Altair followed after him, straddled his chest to hold his arms down with the bony-press of his knees and pulled his knife out of his pocket. 

The man’s face was bleeding and he was heaving for breath as he looked up at him through the white-shock of pain and the red-haze of quick-welling blood. Altair said, “I have questions.” His-English was Wren’s-English was hard to understand but he had learned to memorize words as a series of sounds when he couldn’t translate them himself. 

“Fuck,” the man said. He spit a mouthful of blood at Altair.

Altair punched him hard in the shoulder and held him in place as he wheezed in pain. “You will answer my questions or I will simply dispose of you and find another. There has never been a shortage of Templars in the world.” The words slipped out of English-into-Arabic and back again to English but his meaning was plain enough. 

“No,” the man said.

Altair smiled at him—the smile that Malik and Maria both hated in equal measures, the smile Al Mualim had given him when he was so very young and naïve. “You will give me a name,” he said in English, “you will tell me the one that poses as an Assassin that sent you to find me.”

“I won’t,” the man said.

“You will,” Altair promised him. “And when you do, I will let you die but not before.”

\----&\----

It was mid-morning before Altair came back. Malik waited for him in the yard, out-and-away from the suffocating closeness of too-many people he didn’t-know, couldn’t-trust and had found himself unfortunately in league with. There were so many questions in his head there was no space for thought but an erratic rise and fall of worry-and-anger.

The anger was useful. The worry was a thick-wet black blanket that weighed him down.

Altair was wearing fresh clothes when he came back: jeans, black shoes, a fresh shirt and jacket. He had a pocket of knives that struck together when he crouched in front of where Malik sat. There was a fresh bruise on his face over the pink scratches and the smell of blood thick and close to his body. “I remember everything,” he said. “All of it, all at once. There is no order to the things that I remember. One minute I am lonely for the people that I miss, one moment I am furious that it is you—you that hates me—that is the only thing I truly know in this world, and then again I am frightened and hurt as I have not been since I was very young.”

“It fades,” Malik told him. “Everything slowly becomes—less. The things and the people that we knew become less important until something aggravates a memory. I could remember every moment of my imprisonment when I was near Abbas. I can hardly remember it now.”

“Shaun told me about Abbas,” Altair said. He looked proud (if only for a moment) before he said, “we cannot walk away from this battle.”

No. “I have not known a time when you could walk away from any battle. Why would this one be any different?” Malik wanted to shake him, to grab him by the skinny shoulders and shake him until something _changed_. But he said, “what have you learned?”

“Thomas Grand has sold his allegiance to the Templars,” Altair said. “He lives—”

“I know where he lives.” _I stood in front of him, the way I stood in front of Rosario, the way I stood in front of countless other Templars and saw nothing-at-all but my own hatred for this world I was born into._ “We cannot attack him there. He is well protected by the Assassins who think that he is loyal to the Creed.” 

“His Templar masters are unhappy with him. They do not think he is capable of controlling this situation. They are unhappy that so many of their own have been lost to this and they are impatient for results. The man I interrogated told me this.” 

“That is useful to know,” Malik said. Then he stood up and motioned Altair to follow after him back into the house. “If this is a fight that you intend to see through, we will need the assistance of people who are more familiar with its modern incarnation.” 

Altair followed him a handful of steps before catching him by the elbow and stopping him at the door. “Lucy is safe from us,” he said, “unless she strikes first.”

Many less-savory deals had been made with far less useful people during the course of their lives. Malik would rather have found proof of Lucy’s true allegiance and used it as a death warrant. “It is a shame you could not remember a time when caution was not in your nature.”

Altair frowned at him and let go of his arm. “I would have killed her. It was you that stayed my hand.” 

No, it was Desmond and his insistence. Malik had been moved only by the lack of proof, and the damage her death might have caused the fragile peace they were all operating under. “It is done.” And it cannot be undone.

\--

“Well that’s brilliant,” Shaun said when Altair came to a pause. They were all sitting on the floor of the living room with the large black boxes of their things in a protective pile behind Rebecca. “How reliable to do you think this information is?”

“Very,” Altair said.

Rebecca was frowning at the information. “He wasn’t even on the list of people we thought were most likely. There hasn’t been any activity to suggest that he’s one of them.” 

“Except that he just happened to need Malik days after the Italian Brotherhood all but flat out said they were going to put him down like a misbehaving dog?” Desmond said. “I’m no expert on conspiracies but that seems pretty convenient.”

“Isn’t Shaun the resident conspiracy expert?” Lucy asked. Her voice was hoarse-and-bruised. The marks on her throat were ugly and dark, spread out in the shape of fingers. But she sat there in their circle with her dead-eyed-shark-stare intently watching whoever was speaking. “Maybe we should just let him see if he can find anything fishy. If you’re going to go after a Grandmaster with such a loyal following you’re either going to need a bigger-meaner ally or a hell of a lot of proof.”

“There may not be sufficient proof. Thomas Grand grew up in the brotherhood he now heads. His father and his grandfather were both Master Assassins. The problem won’t just be proving that he has turned against the Creed but proving it to people that have grown up with him and trust him explicitly.”

Malik understood-English well enough (better now without headaches and white pills, perhaps) but the drone of their voices and the overlay of their worry was hard to follow. Altair was frowning at every-thing-they-said as if he were going to shatter into a thousand pieces of shrapnel. It was the clear face of his youth when he scowled at their ceaseless words and slammed his fist into the ground. Shaun-and-Desmond-and-Rebecca both jumped in shock but Lucy didn’t so much as flinch.

“It can be done,” Altair said. 

“He will out himself as a Templar if we apply enough pressure. Our intervention does not need to be so direct,” Malik said. 

“Yes,” Altair agreed. “The Templar leaders are displeased that their men are being killed. We simply kill _more_. Sooner or later, Thomas will have to come face us or admit defeat.”

“I think you’re forgetting that we’re hopelessly outnumbered,” Rebecca said.

Shaun leaned in close enough to whisper to her in a manner that wasn’t quiet at all. “You are speaking to a man who once cut his way through two armies to assassinate one man. I doubt he considers us hopelessly outnumbered. Malik and Lucy are both Master Assassins. Desmond is competent, I’ve heard. Altair can be taught whatever skills he hasn’t retained.”

“We need targets,” Desmond said.

“We need a better safe house,” Lucy said. 

“Now that, I can do.” Rebecca was already reaching for her equipment, mumbling about internet-and-her laptop and other things that sounded garbled and strange to him. Shaun was agreeably nodding along, offering his own snide recommendations about where to look.

Altair was staring at Desmond-and-Lucy with a gleam in his eyes. His frown was smoother across his full lips but there was no less distrust and disgust caught around his eyes. He barely noticed Malik until they were touching elbows. “I want you to train with Desmond,” Altair said.

“You should remember that you are not a mentor in this world, Altair.” And therefore could not so easily give out orders that he expected to be followed without protest. “Explain to me why I should leave you with the woman.”

Altair looked away from the two of them to stare at Malik in confusion. “I cannot remember a time when my rank was ever relevant to you. Never once have you followed an order you did not believe in. You should leave me with the woman because she is not here for you or me.” He nodded his head at Desmond and the stupid-soft-smile he had on his face when he looked at Lucy while she talked. 

\--

The yard was not meant for sparring. The clear space was narrow and interrupted by many decorative obstacles. The ground was uneven with hidden dips-and-hollows that were easy to trip on. There was nobody to oversee their training—Shaun and Rebecca were both inside bent over their computers searching for a list of men-and-women that were soon to die. 

Desmond hit the ground hard with a sneer on his face and blood at the edge of his lips. He was clutching at his chest with one hand as he dug into the damp grass with his other. The spots of color on his lightly-tanned cheeks were white-and-red as he gasped for breath. 

Malik reached out a hand to help him back to his feet but Desmond kicked him in the shin like a sullen child. So Malik stepped away from him and waited until the man got back to his own feet. “The way you move is very similar to Altair,” Malik said.

“That doesn’t seem to be doing much for me,” Desmond said. He rubbed the back of his neck and pulled the long zipper of his jacket down. His shirt under was tight-and-black with sleeves that stopped halfway to his elbow. There were tight muscles all along his chest and back and down his arms. The tattoo that Malik had seen little pieces of before was large and black and spread over the whole of his forearm. “Apparently, the only reason he got the glory was because you lost your arm.”

Ah what a wonderful thought that was. “You are proficient at his motions but you lack his confidence and natural talent,” Malik said.

Desmond shrugged. “What can I say? Killing just never came naturally to me.”

“Again,” Malik said.

He pinned Desmond against the ground with his left hand pushed in hard where the blade would have slid between his ribs. He held him down and watched the way he sagged in relief against the ground. There was a broil of embarrassed pride in his face when he didn’t look at Malik but his body was exhausted. “We will continue tomorrow,” Malik said.

“What, tired of kicking my ass already?” Desmond said. 

“Yes,” Malik said. “I prefer sparring partners that allow me to challenge myself.” He slapped Desmond’s cheek as he pulled back and walked away from the soft curses the man muttered at his back. 

\--

It had taken months for Malik to get over the foreign nature of guns. He had acclimatized to them only out of necessity and learned to clean-and-assemble-and-shoot them only when he was expressly told that he would be put out of commission if he did not. 

“You have been shot by one of these,” Altair said. He was sitting in the room they claimed as their own with his legs crossed and a towel spread out before him. A handgun had been disassembled and left sitting on it. 

“Yes, from a distance.” Malik sat opposite him and watched the way Altair’s hands were twitching as he looked from piece to piece. After a pause, Altair started assembling the weapon. When he fumbled a step he took the entire thing apart again and started fresh. “I’m sorry about Maria,” Malik said when the gun was fully assembled and sitting on the towel. 

“Thank you,” Altair said. He didn’t look at Malik, but picked up the gun to pull it apart again. 

\--

Night came and found them with a short list of Templars that were in-the-city or very near it. Rebecca looked deadened from need to sleep and Shaun had been a hyper buzz of energy born of too little sleep and too many cups of tea. Desmond was waking up from sleeping away the afternoon and Lucy was sitting with him in the dim kitchen, telling him whatever secrets she had left to tell.

Malik ate and showered and found a place to rest. Altair was sleeping already, curled up with his hand over a knife and his face slack with deep sleep. He did not even flinch when Malik made his bed. 

\--

But he woke up in the morning to find Altair a living reincarnation of the man that he had spent the whole of his life hating. The man that killed his brother and cost him his arm hadn’t even had the humility to be ashamed of himself for it. The arrogance was like armor built around his body, like a shimmer on his face as he looked down at Malik as if he were _nothing_ but an inconvenience he was being forced to deal with.

A problem with ReCarns, Shaun had told him in the beginning, was how unpredictable they could be. The practice of pairing a volatile ReCarn with a steady-and-reliable companion had started only after they had lost one-or-two when they couldn’t regulate their own memories.

“Careful, novice, someone might think you too interested in what you’re looking at.” Malik’s left arm was tingling from just beneath his shoulder to his fingertips like pinpricks of half-reality. He hadn’t stared this version of his friend in the face since they were young men, but the bitter jealousy-and-hatred he felt for him was no less real in his chest.

Altair snorted at that, “you shouldn’t flatter yourself.” 

Malik got to his feet and considered the words—considered the chaotic up-and-down of his first days in this strange new world. He had floundered in the cold blankness of the facility that kept him. Nothing had been real then, nothing had made sense as he cycled through an endless array of memories out-of-order. Shaun told him they were formerly introduced as Malik stood shouting at a wall about insolence and incompetence. But he remembered meeting Shaun when his chest was a liquid fire of grief and his face a disgusting wet mess of tears as he cried for his brother who had been dead so very long Malik could not now remember him in any detail.

Altair smirked at him, stepped close enough to crowd into his space. His body was tipped forward so his face was mere breaths away from him. There was a narrow-fury in his eyes, and a condescending smile at his lips.

Oh-and-Malik- _hated_ -him so bright-and-so _hot_ he couldn’t even think around it. “I do not flatter myself. You flatter yourself to think that I would ever welcome the advances of an arrogant _child_ like you, novice.”

Altair slapped him. It was a motion so purely dismissive and violent that it took all of Malik’s breath and struck all sense-and-reason out of the world for a matter of breaths. He looked back at Altair’s furious-white face and balled his hands up in fists. Altair was breathing heavy, clenching his own hands until his knuckles were weight from the strain. “You,” Altair said as the white fury of his face faded into pink embarrassment. His shoulders relaxed after a pause and he looked _ashamed_ as he reached up to hover his fingers over the bright red mark he’d left on Malik’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what—I—” 

“You got lost,” Malik said. Yes, just that, a momentary slip.

Altair looked down at the floor. His eyebrows flinched and when he was sure that his face was neutral he looked up at Malik again. “It felt very real to me, just now. How long will this happen?”

“It’s worst in the first few months,” Malik said. He relaxed his stance and cleared his throat. “We do have a mission to attend to. Shaun said that he has found a list of men. Lucy said she could identify the best targets. You should go prepare yourself.”

Altair nodded. “You are coming as well?”

“Yes.” Malik watched Altair pack up his bedroll and head out of the door and only after his footsteps were retreating down the stairs did he lean back against the wall and let his body collapse so that he was crouching with his head tipped forward into his hands. His heartbeat was insane in his chest and his face was _burning_ where he was hit. There was something black and unnamed in his chest that felt as if it meant to break him to pieces. He pressed his hands over his eyes and took sleepy-slow breaths until his heartbeat settled into it's normal rhythm. But he did not move, not until he trusted his body to carry him again.


	6. Chapter 6

\----&\----  
Altair had spent his life learning the value of human life in tandem with training how best to take a life. Everything had made sense to him when he was young: right was right and wrong was wrong. Freedom was tantamount—the most important and most basic right of everything living creature. He had given over his life to that belief and he had sworn his allegiance to the Creed that he believed in.

Here he was, again, in a modern age with the same weight settled on his shoulders like an ill-fitting tunic. He was stripped naked and robbed of all the confidence he had once had in his own skills. The strength of this body was sufficient for a young man but it was unpracticed in the art of stealth. He felt clumsy inside of it. In the same way he felt naked without the robes he had always worn on missions, without the hood that had hidden him from plain view.

Desmond gave him a hidden blade that strapped into place on his left hand and worked exact-as-the Apple had told him it might. He was not asked to sacrifice his finger and the added weight of that finger made his hands feel very clumsy. 

“You sure about this?” Desmond asked him.

There was a holster for the gun he was expected to carry that was tight and strange against his ribs. The gun itself was still in Desmond’s hand, still waiting for him to accept it and the whole of the modern world with it. “I want a knife,” he said.

“Shaun said you would.” Desmond handed him the gun and turned back to look through the large black box he had pulled these other weapons from. He pulled a few sheaths up and pulled the blades out of them as he considered each one before he handed a short, curved knife to him. 

“Thank you,” Altair said. He pulled the knife out of its sheath and held it in his hand, took a step back to practice a few basic defense stances with it and found that he liked the weight of it. It hooked easily on his belt and was mostly covered by the fall of the jacket Desmond gave him. It was heavy-and-black with a zipper up the front and two pockets to tuck his hands in. There was a collar that stood up against his neck and then a hood to pull up. 

“Good luck,” Desmond said.

“You as well,” Altair said.

\--

The target was named Delia and she had gone from posing as a nurse to hiding in a sordid little hotel at the edge of town. Cops had swarmed the school after the security guard had been murdered, but they had been whipped up into a frenzy when they discovered the security guard had never actually belonged in the school. The news was a constant repeating reel of conspiracy theories about the slow-steady infiltration of a seemingly ordinary high school by those that did not belong there.

Lucy had driven them as close as she dared to go before they hid the car in a diner parking lot among an assortment of other cars and took up a leisurely walk toward the hotel a few miles north. She was wearing white again, clothes that fit tight to her skin and a jacket that covered most but not all of the blackened bruises on her throat. 

“I’m not the enemy,” Lucy said.

Altair was concentrating on the monotony of walking, thinking of the woman’s face he was being sent to kill. He only looked at her because the way she stared at him was an obnoxious rub of goosebumps on his neck. He hated to be stared at—he always had—and she would not relent. “You are the very definition of an enemy,” he said.

“Because I was a spy?” Lucy said.

Altair stopped and turned so that she had the full of his attention. He looked at her again—out here in the sunshine and fresh air—and the faint red glow that covered her body flickered and pulsed but did not once shift toward the soft blue color of any friendly intent. “I do not yet know what motivates you,” he said, “but I do know that are not a friend. I have had the displeasure of dealing with many of your kind. For now, you are useful to me and so I will stay my blade.”

“Things aren’t so simple here,” she said.

“Nothing has ever been simple.” Altair started walking again and after a moment, Lucy followed after him. She said nothing further in her own defense and he was thankful for her silence.

\--

Altair stood on the narrow walkway of the second story hotel rooms and watched the maid knock on doors and announce her presence. She seemed harassed by the job that she was doing, constantly on the edge of some deeper unhappiness. The people that opened the door were a variety of moods—pleased, aggravated, and one or two of them outright rude. Lucy had gone to fetch the room number from the man in the office.

She came back as the maid knocked at another door with a tired-and-bored announcement of her intentions to offer fresh towels. Beyond a bored looking sideways glance, she didn’t seem to care that Altair had been watching her for ten-straight minutes as she was refused door-after-door. 

Lucy returned with a room number and Altair walked down the narrow walkway to the last door. He knocked on the door and waited for the disgruntled shout from within. Then he motioned at Lucy who frowned at him but said, “room service, do you need towels?”

There was a scuffle of someone moving within before the door pulled open. Altair was leaning against it as it opened, staring through the narrow opening until the woman’s face came into view. She was brilliant gold in his vision—the face of his target—and he put his right arm against the door to push it open farther and stepped in quickly with his left arm darting forward to meet the soft space just under this woman’s ribs. He triggered the mechanism that controlled the blade just before his palm met flesh and Delia only barely had the time to register she was being attacked before the blade tore into her body. 

Her mouth opened and his hand covered it easily as he pushed her further into the room. Her steps stumbled and he caught her to keep her from making too loud a noise as she fell. Lucy was crowding her way into the room and pushing the door closed. Delia looked at her with wide-bright eyes and an accusing finger. 

“Traitor,” Delia said.

Altair pulled the knife out of its sheath and put his hand over Delia’s face, across the hateful glare she looked at Lucy with, over her gaudy-red-mouth to pull her chin down toward her chest. His arms were strong from too many nights of Wren’s sleepless exercise, and he drove the knife through the top of Delia’s skull before more useless words could spill out of her mouth. Her body went limp in an instant, her voice gargled in her throat and he pulled his knife free and wiped it clean on the scratchy bathrobe she wore. 

“We have to go out through the back,” Lucy said.

Altair followed her to a narrow window. He went first, dropping from the windowsill to the ground and nearly losing his balance when he landed awkwardly. Lucy fell with more grace and caught his elbow to pull him away from the hotel through another parking lot and into a narrow strip mall half filled with cars. 

\--

“How many men have you killed?” Altair asked. They were taking a long, winding path back to the car. He had reached a numb point inside his own head—lost somewhere between the memories of his previous life and the few things had retained from Wren’s memory of this one. It was freeing to feel nothing-at-all but the current discomfort of his own body. 

“Myself?” she said, “three or four. I have never assassinated anyone. That wasn’t what I was trained to do, you know. I mean—we’re all trained to kill but almost none of us make it as actual Assassins. Not like you anyway.” 

Altair caught her by the elbow and pulled her to a stop, made her look at him. There was fear there under the bravado of her steady-stare. It was a crack in the armor she had built herself, and he crowded closer to see how far he could push her. “I have killed many people in many different ways with many different weapons. I was born and raised to bring swift death to those that stand against the Creed.”

Lucy didn’t flinch but stood her ground even when she couldn’t control the fear in her eyes or the way her pulse sped up where his thumb dug into her arm. “It is going to be very difficult for us to work together if you’re going to keep threatening me.”

“It is only a threat if you are an enemy of the Creed,” Altair said. And then, because she had a professional interest in him but something deeper-and-harder to define in “Desmond is an Assassin.”

“Because of me,” Lucy said, “because I got him out, because I gave him something to believe in. Because I gave him a weapon and pointed him in the right direction. You can believe whatever you want about me but I am _not_ your enemy.”

\--

In the car, the slim phone Lucy kept in her pocket started chiming over the calm drone of the radio. She answered it with one of her hands on the wheel, “yes?”

Altair couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the phone, couldn’t tell by the blankness of Lucy’s face what information she was being given. The tone of her voice was steady-and-regulated (all the very best traits of a spy, so very calm under pressure) when she said she understood the information and repeated back a new address before hanging up. 

“Something has happened,” Altair said.

Lucy slipped the phone back into her pocket and took a sharp right down a side street. They traveled a minute distance—long enough for Altair to sit up straighter and for Lucy to find a place to stop the car. She did not put the car in park but kept her foot to the brake and half turned to look at him. “We have a new target,” she said. “His name is James Herr.”

\--

Something-was-wrong. Altair could feel it between his shoulders and set somewhere deep into his chest and gut. It was a twisting-ugly-worry that he couldn’t control, something that caught at his breath and made it speed up with the pounding of his pulse. He was distracted-and-dangerous with a worry dogging at his steps as they did circles around the office building James Herr was currently-hiding in. 

“There’s metal detectors,” Lucy said, “and God knows how many Templars are actually in that building. I mean, Shaun said that James Herr was pretty high level so there’s no reason to think that he’s alone in there.”

No. Something-was-wrong. They shouldn’t be _here_ right _now_. Altair had sat at Malik’s side listening to the dissonant _noise_ of Shaun’s voice as he listed off the names of men-and-women they were going to kill. He had listened to them divide the lot, listened to them ordering them by difficulty and he couldn’t remember (not now) anything about this man or this building. 

Something was-not-right. 

He found himself pacing, back-and-forth, retracing the same five-six-seven steps until the very ground beneath him should have been polished smooth by the black soles of his shoes. The building was too sleek, too sheer to climb and there were too-many-people in it. There was no reason (and no way) to make an attempt on James Herr right _now_.

But Lucy was standing there, hands in her pockets, looking like she was trying to work out the solution to an impossible problem. Lucy-the-traitor, Lucy-the-spy. Lucy with shark-eyes that stared at him without pity but something closer to discomfort and disgust. 

It was as much a shock to him as her when tackled her to the ground. His body felt too-big for the broil of unknown emotions in his chest and his voice was too-old-too-grown. He was a little boy when he hit her, just a stupid child with no idea what sense he was meant to find in the world. He was an _easy target_ to manipulate and the world was full of men-with-power that loved to make use of talent-like-his. 

“Do you think I’m a fool!” he screamed at her.

The door opened behind him, there was a close-loud shout demanding what he thought he was doing. They kept on, shouting at him in English. Altair turned to look at them, felt Lucy slipping out from under him in his moment of distraction. She was on her feet with blood welling out of cut on her cheek and both of her dainty-white-hands grabbing his arm. 

Altair was on his feet, moving toward the two guards glowing red-not-blue with Lucy being dragged behind him. Every-single-muscle was alive with possibility and he was looking over his targets for the weakest-point where he could attack. They were both bigger than him, burly where he was slim, armed with guns when he had a knife. Their thick throats were easy enough to reach but he would be lucky to get one—getting both would be an impossibility even when the shock factor.

“Malik!” Lucy shouted at him in the middle of a stream of sounds-not-words that he didn’t understand. There was desperation in her body as he shrugged her off.

\----&\----

Malik was having a piss poor day, really. Desmond was a competent enough Assassin but he didn’t have the stomach for blood. There had been two targets sharing a common van—posing as reporters—Desmond was meant to kill one to flush out the second so that Malik could take care of them.

But the man got blood on his hands and his jacket and he lost all the smooth-shift of energy and confident motion of his body. He was suddenly a stumbling-idiot with wide eyes and pale skin staring at the spray of body-hot blood covering his hands and soaking into the black fabric of his jacket. 

The second target had emerged with a gun and Malik had only just barely knocked them away from shooting Desmond in the head. He’d lost his footing, ended up on his face on the concrete with the target scrambling across him to grasp at his lost gun. They were fools rolling on rocky-sun-hot pavement. 

He shoved a knife through the targets throat in the same split-second the target had gotten the gun. It discharged so close to his face that his ear shrieked in bloody-hot pain and it was only a lifetime’s worth of training that kept him from screaming at the shock of it. Malik couldn’t walk straight with his ear draining blood and his head throbbing, but he dragged Desmond up out of the puddle and shoved him away.

All he could hear was the shrill ringing in his ear that kept dragging his balance too far to the left.

\--

“You killed the guard,” Malik said. He had one hand cupped around his ear to block out the painful bursts of noise all around them. His fingers were slick-and-red and the whole left side of his face felt swollen and hot. 

“Is that supposed to make it better?” Desmond demanded, “the guard at the school was trying to kill you. That woman back there wasn’t doing anything! I stabbed her in the back. I stabbed her and I didn’t even feel anything about it. I just—I knew it had to be done and that I had to do it and I did and I didn’t feel a damn thing.” Desmond stopped around a corner, out of sight of the street, looked at his clothes with a sneer of disgust and then at Malik and the blood still oozing out of his ear. “Let me look at that.”

Malik lowered his hand and Desmond hissed in sympathetic pain. He didn’t touch him but cocked his head and stared at his ear as if he imagined he could see inside of it to where his ear drum was a throbbing-swollen-pain. His whole jaw was aching in accompaniment. “You were born an Assassin,” Malik said.

Desmond’s was still staring into the red mess of his ear, using just the tip of his thumb to move it slightly one way or another. His face was still pale and caught up in trying to see through the fresh-and-drying blood. “And I ran away. I didn’t want to be part of this life. I can’t imagine anyone that would.” He pulled his hands away and wiped his thumb uselessly against his pants. “I’ve killed people when I had to: to escape or to survive. I understand why those people had to die, what good it’s going to do in the world but I just stabbed a woman in the back and held her until her heart stopped.” He looked _defeated_ in that moment, like nothing more than a very young child questioning all the things he had ever been taught. “All the good it’s going to do feels…insignificant.”

“You are not a killer, Desmond,” Malik said.

“All evidence to the contrary.”

Malik shrugged. He shifted his stance so his right ear was closer to Desmond, so the sound of his sighs-and-the mumble of his words were louder and easier to hear. The throbbing in his left ear had dimmed to a dull sort of pain, aggravated only by the occasional loud honk of a passing vehicle. “The Creed is made up of many different kinds of men. History remembers best and most often the men that slayed the most enemies. But, behind those men, there are many more. Men that sought knowledge, men that crafted new tools—”

“You clearly haven’t met my father,” Desmond said bitterly. The phone in his pocket started ringing and he pulled it out to look at the number. “It’s Shaun.” He put the phone up to his ear and said, “Desmond,” as if it could have been anyone else answering the phone. “No. Yeah, mission successful on our end.” Pause. “Well I think Malik’s busted his ear drum but otherwise we’re good.” Another pause—longer than the one before. “What?” And another. “Tell me the address. Find out who made the call.” Desmond hung up the phone and pushed it back into his pocket. “We’ve got to go, someone’s got Altair.” He was turning his body toward where they parked the car, “can you run?” and reaching his hand back to grab Malik’s left wrist to pull him regardless of his answer.

\--

The building was nearly a perfect square with two double doors, one set that entered through the north and one that entered in through the south. The sides of the building were reflective glass with narrow strips of brick running between the six-almost-seven foot panels. It stood four stories high with a series of antenna reaching up into the sky. The name emblazoned across the top declared it to be The Rights Tower. 

“We’re fucked,” Desmond said. They were standing in a lonely crowd of people waiting to break into a favorite lunch-time diner. Next to a horde of young businessmen they were sorely out of place. “Do you see this? There’s no way to climb it, there’s no way we can just walk in there.” 

“Call Shaun,” Malik said. He hadn’t been in this world for very long—a matter of months spent mostly in hibernation or forced isolation but he knew of-some-things. He knew a playbook of ruses and schemes that they had handed to him, that Shaun had spent hours translating into Arabic for him. 

“Yeah,” Desmond said. He was fumbling with his phone, trying to look completely unassuming in the crowd and instead made the young woman with the smart gray skirt standing in front of them look at him with far too much curiosity. She turned back around after a pause but her spine was a rigid rod of unease. “What am I asking Shaun?”

“Tell Shaun, 514. He will explain it to you.” Malik was watching the building across the street, kept his place until there was a crackle on the other end of the phone line that meant someone-had-answered. Then he started walking forward and Desmond kept his place in line as his voice took on a stressed lilt. 

The north doors of the building opened and a cluster of women came out of it. They were chatting at one another while they dug through their purses. One-two-three of them didn’t notice or care that he existed, four-five of them didn’t so much as flinch when he was close enough to see the hue of their lipstick and the smear of blush across their cheeks. 

Six, the last woman through the door stuttered in her footstep one-half-second too long when she saw him. Her smart-business suit was fitted to her body, her professional-woman make up was a perfect match to the women she was walking with, but she wasn’t-like-them. He stopped far enough away to get a decent head start on any guards that might come out. 

“Assassin,” the woman hissed at him. She was just reaching into her bag at the same moment he stopped moving and raised the gun he had pulled from the holster at his side. He shot her twice in the head. The report of the gun made the pain in his ear stab sideways through his head and the high-pitched shriek of the other women drove needles through the side of his face. He breathed-through the pain and tucked the gun back into the holster as he made a sharp turn toward the west where there were many-many doors and buildings with stairs to hide in. 

The guards came with angry shouts, pushing through the glass doors and screaming after him. The mid-day lunch crowd was running away in a panic, fleeing in every possible direction. He slipped between their frantic bodies and followed after them for several paces before he broke from the pack and found an open door to walk through.

\--

Malik found himself in a top-floor antiques store where a dreary older lady sat behind the counter as if she heard nothing of the rising commotion out of the window. She looked up at him only after he was close enough the vibrations from his footsteps must have been felt through the floor. Her mouth opened with a wet sound but she did not speak to him. Her withered hand picked up a bell and shook it.

A man—much younger (a son, perhaps) came from the back room with his mouth full of angry words at being disturbed. He stopped long enough to rub his hands together when he saw Malik and smiled at him so very sweetly, “oh and what can I do for you? Are you here for something specific?”

If there had been more time, Malik might have been able to create a clever ruse but this modern age was equipped with modern conveniences and he had limited time. So he pointed a gun at the man and said, as clearly in English as he could manage, “I need clothes and a bathroom.”

The woman opened her mouth wide and the man put his hands up. He said, “don’t hurt my mother.”

\--

Back on the street, the northern entrance of the Rights Tower had been sectioned off with bright-yellow tape The cluster of police officers were thickest in the front, with a few unhappy souls stuck at the line of the gathering crowd. Malik tugged at the tweed suit coat that was itchy and heavy on his arms and waited behind the glass door until a cluster of bodies walking toward the commotion passed close enough for him to slip among them. It was easy to keep pace with them while he watched the way the cops moved. 

For a moment, he hung in the back of the crowd, watching the here-and-there of the cops as they blocked the body from view and dealt with the women that were all standing together with bright-red eyes and confused mumbles. The lobby of the building was visible through the propped open door. There were several guards with guns strapped to their waists that were detailing what they’d seen and one harassed older man in a suit that was nodding agreeably to the horror and shock of such an unthinkable crime.

Malik walked back up the line of buildings to the southern entrance, to where a smaller force of police officers were holding off reporters and gawkers and watching the doors to be sure nobody tried to leave. He slid into the narrow crowd behind the police barricade. He had no watch (of course not) but he raised his wrist to look as if he had one and then leaned forward far enough to ask the woman in front of him if she could update him on what happened. They made a show of looking horrified about violence and worried about loved-ones inside (her sister, she said, worked on the second floor). 

An echoing report of gunfire made the six policemen at the southern entrance jerk away from reassuring platitudes (for families) and borderline rudeness (toward reporters) to stand at full attention like a bloodhound. One called the shots in on the radio and two-then-three of them broke away in an easy run toward the sound. They were shouting back and forth at one another while the few remaining urged everyone to head inside where it was safe. Malik moved with the crowd, worked his way to the edge where the men disappeared down the street and started walking.

Another set of gunshots came farther-away still. Malik found a blind corner to crouch in and waited. After-a-pause, an officer was running back toward the front, clutching his radio in one hand and carrying his firearm in the other. His distraction was the repeating sound of gunfire coming from the west (not south) and it was enough for Malik to step forward and drag him back.

\--

No plan was perfect, of course. Malik had not wasted very much time on creating a perfect plan, or even one that was well-informed. His plan operated on two basic principles: 1. the Templars would cooperate with any officials in front of a large number of onlookers and 2. The Templars wanted Altair alive.

\--

Malik, dressed as yet another police officer, entered through the South entrance, slipped around the obstructive metal detectors and walked toward the door to the stairs. He paused outside of it to look around the wide-open lobby crowded full of policemen and company guards. There was a detective with a grim frown asking about the woman that had been shot—where she worked and who knew her best.

The stairwell was cool when he stepped into it. The stairs were metal, painted tan, and there were clusters of people standing by the glass staring out in the crowd with anxious teeth on fingernails. He climbed slowly behind them, nodded reassuringly whenever one or two of them looked back at them. After too many missions with a voice in his ear, he felt disturbingly alone and it did nothing to quell the bit of doubt that was building in his belly.

He checked the second floor and found it full of police officers and office workers so he went up to the third floor where a crowd of employees were hovering at the windows at the end of the halls. They were full of nerves, talking loudly about their plans for the rest of the day and how their bosses wouldn’t very-much-like delays like this. He passed through them with his head up (not down) and his footsteps official-and-quick. There were too many of them to listen to, too many of them to look for tells and signs. He found a hall and followed it to the end, down to a single wooden door with the word ‘records’ across it and pushed it open. 

It smelled like paper inside. He stopped at the desk in the front and found it empty, went to the left where a hallway led another series of doors. Each of them led to rooms filled floor to ceiling with files. When he came back up the hallway there was a woman standing just inside of the door with her arms over her chest.

“Well,” she said, “did you find some kind hostage? You know, we’d all really appreciate if you would put more effort into finding the man that killed that woman and less time into looking for a phantom.” 

Malik moved forward and she sneered at him with so much disdain that it was very nearly a physical sensation against his skin. He put his right hand over her mouth and used the flat of his left hand to shove her body against the wall behind her back. Her eyes were wide-with-something like shock but was quick to break his lose hold.

The fight was short-and-vicious. Her nails were sharpened like knives and every blow she landed was perfectly aimed for some tender, soft part of his body. He only barely managed to duck out of the way of a paperweight meant to brain him and came up from the ground to drive the hidden blade into her chest. The fight wheezed out of her mouth and she fell into him. 

“You killed me,” she said.

Malik did not move his hand, tried not to jostle her more than he had to as he lowered her to the ground. Her face was pinched full of pain as he laid her out. “I had planned to look through your rooms until I found the phantom you spoke of.”

“What luck you have,” she said to him. Her hands were on his wrist and her eyes closed briefly as her skin started to turn all white underneath her make up. The breath in her throat was getting wet and her voice was a timber of fear. “She said you would come. They laughed at her.”

“Tell me where he is.”

“Why? Will you spare me if I do? I think it’s too late for that.” Blood was oozing out of the wound his hand was pressed against. Even now she could feel her chest filling with blood, feel the pressure of it as it suffocated her lungs and leeched power from her heart. Her fingers were turning cold as they gripped his wrist. 

“I can still hurt you,” Malik said. He didn’t bother to show her his knives, didn’t name the ways he could dismember her still-living body. She knew what he was, who he was even, and her imagination was rife with a thousand-more-ways he could harm her than he could ever think of. “Tell me where he is.”

“I will if you make me a promise,” the woman said.

“I don’t make promises to Templars,” Malik said. He moved to pull his hand back and she panicked at the feeling of the blade moving in her body. Her fingernails dug into his skin and held him in place. “Tell me where he is.”

“Fourth floor, second staff bathroom.” There was a red mist in her mouth when she talked and her tongue ran across her lips as tears caught at the edge of her eyes. Her hands were still gripping uselessly at him when he pulled his hand back and her mouth was open in a muffled-little-scream as he opened the door. She was trying to crawl to catch him when he pulled the door shut behind him.

\--

The fourth floor was executive offices (so the sign on the stairwell assured him). It was quiet while the other floors had been full of chaotic noise. The offices were partitioned off with glass panels and wooden doors. A single rounded desk stood in the center of the wide hall across from the elevators. Large metal letters were set into the half wall behind it, proclaiming it to be the general information desk. There was nobody sitting behind it, and nobody in the first glass office he passed. 

Malik walked slowly-and-quietly down the hall, around the information desk and to the narrow hall behind it that led to solid walls and more doors. These doors were labeled so clearly as the ones in the front. He touched the handles as he passed them, passed over the ones that were locked and stopped to listen quietly at the ones that weren’t. 

“Why are you here?” There was a cop standing at the mouth of the narrow hall. “You should be down with the others. We’ve already cleared this floor.” He was shouting, reaching down to his belt and the gun that was clipped into place there. “Who told you to come up here?”

Malik was walking back toward him, trying to look sheepish and going by the steadily more alarmed look on the man’s face failing remarkably. He made it nearly all the way to the man before the skittish stare turned into real fear. The man was reaching for his gun now and Malik barely had time to duck out of the way. The bullet grazed across the top of his left shoulder and he hit the ground. (The sound of it, the fucking resounding loudness of the gun discharging made his head throb.) 

The man was saying something into his radio and Malik clutched at his ear as it bled fresh. He managed to get his hand on his own gun and pointed it up-and-approximately where the man was standing before pulling the trigger. It was sloppy-shoddy-terrible shooting that would have gotten him shouted at in Italian for hours. The bullet hit flesh only by some remarkable grace. 

The man fell back against the wall in shock and Malik clamored up to his feet with an unsteady lurch to knee the man in the groin and take the gun from his lax grip. There was a red fount in his gut that he clutched at as his body folded forward. Malik grabbed him by both shoulders and pushed him against the wall.

“Where is he?” he asked.

“Fuck you,” the man spat.

Malik punched him in the wound, felt the slimy-slip of blood-and-body fluids on his fist and caught the man by the throat when he bent over double again. He pushed his body flat against the wall and said, “tell me where he is.”

The man’s face was red-and-white and there were tears in his eyes as he shoved at Malik with ineffective hands. He was shuddering all-over as his body jerked and jolted with spasms of pain. When his voice came back he gasped, “fuck you,” again.

Malik pulled his hand up and slapped it against the wall, held it in place with his left hand and reached into his pocket to retrieve one of his knives from its sheath. He brought it up and cut the man’s first finger off. It fell to the ground with an echoing scream of pain and a dull-wet thud. “I will reduce you to _pieces_ ,” Malik said.

The man was blubbering in pain as he told Malik where to go.

\--

Malik was having a piss-poor day.

He found the second-staff-bathroom through an empty office. It wasn’t locked, but inside there was a cluster of bodies standing with their backs turned to him. Each of them had their sleeves rolled up to their elbows as they talked idly. Altair was sitting in a chair with his arms tied behind his back and his head lolled forward loosely. There were blood spots over the bruises on his chest and his hair was streaked with dried blood and held in the shapes of fists that must have pulled his head up. 

Lucy-the-traitor was standing in the corner with her shoulder against the window and her dead-shark-eyes looking right at him. 

Malik shot the first man, lowered the gun to stab the second in the throat, shot the man that turned toward the sound of the first shot and was left standing in front of the fourth man who had a gun pointed straight at him. His head was ringing and his ear was bleeding-again. Staring at the man that was most likely to kill him (in this life), he felt nothing but a sense of brutal rage. 

Lucy shot the man in the head. The blowback of his blood hit her face and sprayed across the tight-white of her shirt. Altair jerked up in the chair and struggled against the belts that bound his arms in place, he was jerking his head from side to side and cursing in Arabic before he saw Malik.

“Desmond knows now,” Malik said.

Lucy was pointing a gun at him, staring at him like he was nothing more than an inconvenience to her. “I am not your enemy,” she said again. “I kept him alive. I called the police myself, I’m the reason they’re even here looking for some kind of prisoner.”

Malik turned to face her completely, took one step forward and watched as she took one step back. He used his knife to cut through the thick-leather belts that held Altair’s arms against the wooden back of the chair. She watched his every motion. 

Altair got to his feet and staggered across the room to the table where his weapons had been laid out. He strapped on the hidden blade and slid the knives into his pockets. He came back to stand at Malik’s side as his whole body sagged in on itself. There was blood on his face, black all around his eye and a brilliant ring of bruises on his throat.

“You kept him alive,” Malik repeated.

“Yes,” Lucy said. There, for the barest of seconds, her posture relaxed and her face softened. It was a plea for understanding-and-friendship, one meant to make him stand down.

He shot her through her right shoulder as she started to smile at him. Her body hit the table behind her and then her knees hit the floor. The gun she was holding clattered to the ground and she groaned in pain as she caught herself on her wounded arm. “I kept you alive,” Malik said, “this is the second time I spared you. It will not happen again.”

\--

Altair followed after him with stumbling footsteps. His chest was still bare and his body was covered with conspicuous wounds. There was no-way, at all he was going to make it through the building and out again without someone noticing. 

“They don’t want me,” Altair said. He was leaning against the doorframe behind Malik, idly watching him sort through the narrow coat closet for anything-at-all that would work to cover Altair’s bare skin and broken skin. “They want the Apple, the want to know how to control it, they want to know how I made it do what I wanted it to do.”

“You should have destroyed it when you had the chance. How many times did Maria and I tell you this? You should have asked it how to be rid of it forever and we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Malik pulled a long dress coat off the rack. It was meant for a woman larger than Altair but it was long enough to cover the splatter of blood that had soaked into his pants. The high collar covered the bruises on his neck and there was a hat tucked into one of the pockets that did a passable job at covering the blood caked in his hair. “You never listen to reason.”

“You are not a creature of reason, Malik.” Altair sounded so damned tired when he said it. He was pulling his body up straight and touching the large black buttons that Malik had hastily fixed. The color of his face was still too pale and almost greenish everywhere it wasn’t bruised or swollen. “How do you intend to get us out of here?”

Well he hadn’t really thought it through. He hadn’t thought it through at all. “I’ll find a way.” He led them out of the office, down the hall and past the body of the cop that he’d shot. They skirted their way around the puddle of blood out into the open space in front of the glass partitions. The stairs were an obvious exit but there was a cluster of people there and an impressive presence of officers keeping them all kept captive.

“Fire,” Altair said. 

\--

They made their way out in the storm of frenzied office workers fleeing for their lives. The police officers were shouting orders that fell on deaf ears over the wail of the fire alarm. The rolling black smoke of the fire they set filled the stair well and the blistering-white-heat of the fire robbed the people of anything but the most basic need for survival. They were inconspicuous bodies in the crush, following along the same path down-down-and-out into the relief of cool air and freedom out in the closed off streets. It was a matter of Malik pulling off the officer’s shirt and leaving it in a heap to be trampled underfoot and pulling Altair against his body with a possessive arm around his waist as he worked their way out of the crowd.

There was a thickening crowd of reporters, and close by an echoing wail of fire trucks rushing to the scene.

They walked until they couldn’t hear the roar of noise. They walked until they were shuffling along on sore-and-tired feet. Altair’s body was a heavy weight against his side and the two of them could barely managed to stay upright. The adrenaline was wearing away and in its place there was only a shivering chill. Malik plucked a phone out of a young man’s pocket when he bumped into them and slipped it into the deep pockets of Altair’s coat. 

They walked until they found a public bus stop with a gathering of tired-and-disgruntled looking patrons to hide behind. Altair fell into the bench and reached into the pocket with his too-pale fingers to pull out the phone. He flipped through two screens to make a call and dialed the numbers Malik told him. 

“You better be dead you bloody stupid fucker,” Shaun said when he picked up the phone, “if you’re not dead I’ll kill you myself.” He sounded strung-out and tense, as if someone had pulled him out of shape and left him in knots. 

Altair raised an eyebrow at the sentiment.

“I’d like to see you try,” Malik said. He told Shaun their location and asked him to be quick. Altair hung up the phone and dropped it on the bench between their bodies. They leaned together, shoulder to shoulder, while they waited.

.


	7. Chapter 7

There were holes in the things that Altair remembered. Entire weeks-and-months of his life had gone gray and dim so that he could barely make out the nebulous shape of them when he tried. Years had faded away to almost-nothing and left him feeling incomplete and bitter.

“What were their names?” Altair asked. His body had gone languid and difficult to move and his mind trapped inside his battered-skull felt like thick soup. Even his tongue felt large and awkward as it moved to make the words that barely made it out through his unmoving jaw. His hands pawed at Malik’s clothes—white robes—as he curled his body in against the heat-and-constant presence of his one living-memory. 

“I remember many names. You must be more specific.” Malik-was-doing something and the distraction was a lull in his voice. But the sound of his living body—gurgle of his stomach, motion of his hands scratching pen on paper, drag of his breath—was enough to anchor Altair to the uninviting _present_ and all of the many aches and pains it offered. 

There had been pills. Shaun had given them pills that Malik explained would make the pain fade to nothing and he’d been willing to feel nothing over the suffocating tightness of so many different aches. (A concussion, Malik told him. Bruised ribs and lacerations-and-swelling on his face. There were lines of cuts on his arms where he’d struggled against the constricting grip of the belts they’d tied him with.) “My sons,” Altair said. His tongue was thick and dry across his lips. 

“Sef and Darim.” 

Yes. Yes, he remembered them in imprecise details. He remembered that Maria had gotten very round when she carried them and that she’d cursed him every minute for weeks-and-months after they were born. But the memory of their births and the pain it caused faded away and she was in his bed again, whispering how much she enjoyed their sons. Altair remembered Maria in vivid colors but he couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like (not really). He could remember how her face looked in anger or amusement or in those sweaty-little-moments when her body was pressed up against his. He couldn’t remember what her skin felt like.

It was hard to hold onto Maria, in a way that was entirely different than how hard it was to hold onto any single memory. His mind was a slippery mess, crashing haphazardly together and falling apart all over again. One second he was fighting to recall the exact shape of Maria’s eyes, the sound of his son’s laughter or the taste of his favorite dish and the next he was plunged into the icy-depths of a memory that felt like more real the reality around him.

Malik—not this one, not present Malik with stitches in his shoulder and bruises on his skin. But distant Malik, long ago around the side of a dusty building with his quick-sharp tongue as he berated Altair about incompetence. Malik’s bones when he cracked his knuckles against them, as the thing in his chest twisted up so confusing and black there was no way to make sense of it.

“I hit you,” Altair said compulsively. His hands clutched at Malik’s solid body, at the robes that he wore. They looked-like, didn’t feel-like the ones they had grown up with. “I hit you because I was disgusted with myself. I made you bleed and told myself you deserved it.”

Malik’s hand stroked through his hair absently, the way one might pet an annoying animal to earn a few moments peace. “It is in the past now. There is nothing to be done about it.”

But it happened, but it was there in his memory and in his body right-now. The shame and guilt that filled his chest up with hot liquid and ruined all of his nightmares. It was only the first time he’d spilt Malik’s blood in a careless effort to rid his body of wayward wants he couldn’t explain. “I shouldn’t have. I should have been a better person.”

The hand in his hair rubbed against his scalp again. “You’ll get there,” Malik assured him, “just give it time.” 

But time had dragged-on-and-on with unrelenting cruelty and not even when he had found a wife and made a family had he ever been free from the guilt-and-shame-and-disgust. He had known every single day of his life (after that first startling moment when his body had gone all tight with deviant notions) exactly what kind of man he really was stripped of all of the armor he’d built around himself. He knew the things he’d dreamed of doing to Malik, knew the violence he’d used to subjugate his own desires and knew the price of all of his denial.

Malik was moving closer, laying himself on the creaking-old mattress where they’d spent most of the past day. He was dark under dim lights, but Altair could make out the shape of his nose and the worried tilt of his face. Malik touched his shoulder so-very-lightly. “Think of Maria,” Malik said, “remember her temper when you would spar and she was so very sure that you allowed her to win. Remembered how she cursed at you and how you begged her to understand your honor would never allow her to win.”

Yes, Altair could remember the dry air of the day, remember the onlookers as they held back their judgments at this strange new woman he’d brought back to them. He remembered the fury in her eyes and the ease with which she fought him. Every sparring match was life-or-death when he sparred with Maria. He remembered how she knocked him in the dirt, how she held him down with a knife at his throat and hissed ‘yield’ at him. He remembered how unsatisfied she was when he gave and how her fury was as hot-as-fire, and it followed after him all the hours of the day until she was creeping into his chambers in night to bite her frustration into his skin.

He fell asleep remembering the feel of her hair slipping between his fingers and the gentle way her fingers traced over his scars when they lay together in a naked heap on his bed.

\--

Desmond was heart-broken but made of something far stronger than Malik assumed. He wasn’t a weak-and-wilting creature the way Malik seemed to think he was. No, Desmond had taken the news of Lucy’s betrayal with violent denial that faded into unhappy acceptance and he’d nursed his wounds in silence as he searched through what memory he had for an answer to the only question that mattered.

The hellish underground pit they were currently squatting in (a basement, Shaun had told him, of a building far enough outside of town that nobody would suspect them) had only three rooms. There was the room where they slept and the one where the others ate and worked bent over their shiny-white screens and then the bathroom that was fit in an odd corner between the two rooms. 

Altair found Desmond in the work room with his hand pressed to his cheek and one of his fingers idly tracing across the mouse pad of one of Rebecca’s lesser laptops. He found a chair with a broken back and pulled it over to sit at the narrow table next to Desmond. His head was still hurting—more when he moved—and his right eye was still hot and puffy from being hit too many times. 

“Malik is going to be angry if he finds you up wandering around,” Desmond said mildly. 

“Yes, but it won’t be an impressive anger.” Altair didn’t like English. It was wooden on his tongue and difficult to concentrate on when he was tired. But he could manage it. “Tell me about Lucy.”

“Lucy is a Templar spy,” Desmond said. His tone did not change, he spoke of her as if she was as much an annoyance to him as the prospect of having his peace disrupted by a childish fit at being left alone. His finger stopped moving on the mouse pad but he didn’t look away from the glow of the laptop screen. “I’m not sure what else matters to you.”

“There are things that do not make sense to me,” Altair said. Many things that did not make sense to him, and some things that had been lost to the blunt edge of a man’s fist trying to break through his skull. But he remembered the small room where they kept him and he remembered Lucy’s frightened face just beyond the edge of red-pain. 

“Really because things seem pretty simple to me. She literally hand delivered you to the very people she told me we had to keep you away from. She apparently kidnapped and tortured Malik for weeks—if Shaun is telling the truth—until she finally managed to reincarnate him. Oh and let’s not forget that she was there the whole time they were trying to shove you into and push me out of my own body.”

“Lucy gave me pills,” Altair said. She had been tasked with watching him when they brought him to the small room, been left alone with him for a matter of moments and she’d dug out a handful of little white pills to push into his mouth and down his throat. Her fingers had been little and slick across his mouth when she tipped his head and made him swallow. Her voice was hoarse and tinny when she promised him it would _help_. “She swore to them she did not know where you were hiding, that you’d moved as soon as she left the safe house that morning and that she wouldn’t know where you were until the evening.” Her passive-face and deadened eyes had looked on unflinching at the cruel-grinning man that had come with a cluster of men with more muscles than brains. The man had caught her face and whispered things into her ears that made her hands twitch at her side but she had looked right at him with fearlessness that bordered on carelessness. “She did call the police when she thought she was alone and tell them that she’d seen someone taken prisoner in the building.”

“I don’t care,” Desmond said. He slapped the laptop shut and the whole room went too-dark-to see for a moment. “Lucy is a Templar spy, just like you said she was, just like Malik said she was. Whatever she did was to save her own ass.”

“The biggest mistake I ever made was believing that human beings could be so easily categorized. Every person is made up of many pieces, each of them building us to a whole. Lucy may be a Templar spy but she is not _only_ a Templar spy. Even if she is your enemy now, she is not only your enemy.” 

“She made a choice,” Desmond said. Whatever else he may have convinced himself of in the dark hours since he had shown up in a stolen car to take Altair-and-Malik to safety, the most damning of all things was that he’d convinced himself Lucy had not chosen him. “You really should go back before he wakes up and finds you’re not there.”

\--

Altair knew they were talking—all the time, talking—but the words slipped past him. Everything was in English, anyway, and they were all so fast when they spoke until the great mess of noise falling out of their mouths filled the narrow-tight room with sounds that could have been anything. Somewhere in the back of his beaten skull all he could hear was the call of animals. Everyone had learned to hunt-and-kill their dinner when it was necessary. That was what they sounded like, just a cluster of animals moving around in the distance, shouting out through the gray fog.

When he slept (here and there) his dreams were caked with blood, and the sound of their voices filled in the empty spaces until it was all he could think-or-hear-or-taste. 

\--

It came in the dark, when the nightmares left him on the verge of sleeplessness and the confinement had driven him to the point of madness. The memories had a way of crawling up his spine and slithering in his brain from somewhere low in his body. He felt _invaded_ and _defiled_ but his own thoughts and the traitorous pound of his beating heart. But the memories came anyway—incessantly picking at him like a scavenger bird over fresh meat.

It was Malik, when they were young-boys. It had always-been-Malik and never Abbas. Abbas had been a friend to him, someone that he trusted-and-confided in. Altair had thought he could have told Abbas anything, and the words had danced on his tongue for days-and-weeks with their far-reaching insignificance. Sometimes, when his brain was given free rein to wander, Altair thought that he would tell Abbas (I want to—) and that Abbas would laugh at him for a fool and drag him away to spar away silly ideas.

But Altair had never said, “I want to kiss you.” Because there was nobody in the whole of the world that he trusted.

Malik was half-sleeping, making soft-murmured noises like a mother’s sweet reassurances as his hand snuck under the T-shirt that Altair wore and his fingers rubbed at his back like he could ease him back into sleep. The tips of his fingers were soft-as-baby skin (still) that did nothing at all to hide the strength in his arm. “Go back to sleep,” Malik said. 

Yes-of-course he should. There were bruises on his skin turning steadily brown-and-yellow and a bruise on his brain making it harder-than-normal for him to concentrate. Too much idle time had drown his thoughts in the soupy-gray nightmare of his own life and the short-ceiling prison they were squatting in had stolen all of his patience and good grace. Sleep-now-Altair, sleep away the things that cannot be changed and wake up again when it’s a new day.

But his chest was filled with a young-man’s fire and his hands were gripping with all the denied fury he’d kept hidden his whole fucking life. It was only Maria that guessed at it when she bit her ownership into his skin. (Oh-but-Altair had loved her every fucking day they had spent together and the dull-and-lifeless ones that came after.) Malik had-been-first and things like that cut a body through to the bone. Altair touched the loose laces dangling from his chest and worked his way up to the bit of dark skin at the top. His fingers slid along Malik’s collarbone, up to his neck where his pulse was starting to pick-up-intensity as he woke. The shape of his jaw was still soft, not as defined as it was when he’d been a man in their last life. Altair’s thumb ran across his lip—dry and smooth except for just in the middle where it was the slightest-bit-damp. 

Altair dug his elbow into the mattress and lifted himself up to kiss Malik. He had-thought-about-it for years (and years). He had created a thousand possibilities, even more circumstances that led to the moment when he could finally (finally) kiss Malik and not a single one of them had ever involved reincarnation and concussions and dingy mattresses in cramped basements. 

Malik’s hand against his chest shoved him backward so that their bodies were as far apart as they could be with Altair still hanging onto the kiss by the last tenuous touch of lips. Malik tipped his head back. “What are you doing?” he snapped at him.

Words had mostly-always failed him. Altair pushed Malik’s hand off his chest and moved back up against him, huffing in frustration when Malik pushed himself away from him again. “Stop that,” Altair said.

“Oh yes, I’ll just lay here while you molest me in my sleep and perhaps I should pretend to be happy about it.” But Malik let himself be caught by the hips and dragged back across the mattress where Altair could fit nicely between the aggravated sprawl of his knees. Both of Malik’s hands were against his chest holding him at a respectable distance but he didn’t bother with even the most passing of objections about the closeness of their legs. “What are you doing?” Malik said again.

“You were always the one that knew things,” Altair said. He didn’t push at the hands holding him away but pulled Malik’s knees up so that his thighs were against his body.

“Yes,” Malik said. It was hard to see his face in the low-light of the room, but the sound of his voice was clear enough he could imagine the exasperation and distaste coloring his expression. One of his hands moved away from Altair’s chest to grab his wrist and pull Altair’s hand off his thigh. “I am aware of what you are doing, as usual your lack of discretion makes your intentions clear. Why are you doing it?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Perhaps because you haven’t asked if I share your feelings, perhaps because I was asleep when you attacked me, or perhaps because there are three other people in the room with us currently.” His grip on Altair’s wrist was tight but he didn’t try to hinder where Altair put his hands. Despite the hard tone of his words he lay passively as Altair pulled up the long ends of his robe to get at the heated skin underneath. “Altair,” Malik said again but quieter-than-before. His let go of Altair’s hip and his wrist to grab at his face and pull him down. “Think for a moment, novice. Surely there were words you intended to use before you sated yourself with my body.”

Altair pulled out of the grasp, sat back on his heels where his brain had the space to think around the dangerous closeness of Malik’s body. His head was full of things (many things) that made it hard to sort out which truth was the most-important-and-true. Because he had hated Malik, he had lusted after Malik, he had respected Malik and he had loved Malik and never-once throughout the whole span of their lives had he stopped wanting him. 

“There must have been something,” Malik said.

“Our lives together were a series of wounds,” Altair said. In the tight darkness of the room around him, there was enough space left in his head to feel around for recent-things. There were simply too many memories overlapping together for him to sort them out, but these were the words that Malik had said to a confused little boy in a bright hotel hallway. 

Malik’s body shifted under him, lifted himself up so he was sitting too, with his legs still spread open around Altair’s body. The pale cast of his robes was more visible than his face in the dimness. Altair didn’t see his hands until they were touching his body. “You cannot deny it was the truth. Whether we intended to inflicted the wounds or not, there were many and often.”

“You risked your life to save mine.” 

“I have,” Malik said. 

Altair looked down at the hand on his chest, put his own paler hand over it. “I might have said, there is so much bad in our world, there are so many things we cannot control, and we have been tasked with the impossible. I see no reason we should not take what little comfort we can.” But the words were never fit to be spoken because Altair had never had the nerve or the gall to use them. 

“I may have hit you then,” Malik said.

“And now?” Altair asked.

“Now, I will only tell you that it is too soon. When you know who you are in this time, when you have figured out what you want _now_ we can talk of this again.” Malik waited a moment until he felt-or-saw Altair’s nod and then he pulled him down into the space next to him. 

\--

Altair couldn’t stand the closed-in suffocation of the room. There was daylight somewhere in the great world beyond these limited walls but the space around him stayed the same stunted gray shadows. The others came-and-went in shifts, looking for dangers, looking for knowledge, retrieving food by whatever means at their disposal. Altair and Malik remained in closed confinement. 

“You can’t leave,” Rebecca said when he went past her in the front room. She wasn’t deadly, wasn’t even a credible threat to anything but the keys of her laptop as she beat at them with frustrated fingers. “Altair,” she said again, “you can’t _leave_.” Despite her weakness she was getting up as he strode past her without comment. “Malik!”

Malik came out of the narrow bathroom shirtless with his wet hair dripping on his broad shoulders. “What?”

“He’s leaving.” Rebecca said. 

Malik tossed the towel he was holding back into the bathroom and motioned Altair onward. They climbed the stairs to the door that led out into an empty building. It looked as if it had been burnt out at some point—barely standing now. There was a generator humming in the corner of the building with a series of cords leading away from it. The bright colors of the cords were masked by the thick sooty dirt. “You cannot go far.”

Altair didn’t want to go far. He picked his way through the building to a hole big enough to count as an exit. He ducked through it and stood out in front of the ruined building looking at nothing but flat-and-empty land with a few sparse trees here and there. The sky was thick with clouds and the air smelled like rain-was-coming. But it was fresh-and-endless unlike the tight little room where he was being held.

“We’re outmatched in this world, Altair,” Malik said. He was leaning against the building, peeling the wet bandage off his shoulder. His wound was still red but didn’t look hot-and-infected. “They have convinced everyone that I am a murderer. Everywhere they are looking for me—and for you, for the boy they think you still are. Thomas Grand is out of hiding now. Shaun and Rebecca have found him in town but he is surrounded by Assassins and Templars alike.” 

“Is that what they have been saying?” Altair asked. His body felt fragile still. His ribs were sore, his face was mottled with fading bruises and the pain in his head was fading but still there. Out here, he spread his arms against the air and tipped his head back. There-was-too-much, so much more than there had been a day ago, more than two days before that.

“They are trying to decide if we can salvage the disaster we’ve made of this or if we should find someone that would believe our desperate pleas.” Malik wasn’t moving, just standing there watching him. 

“I miss our home,” Altair said. He let his arms fall down at his sides, kicked at the unfamiliar scrub grass. “I have travelled many places, I have seen many things—and I thought that I would never travel so long or so far that I would miss my home. I thought I could carry with me all of the things that I would need.”

“I would not have thought you could be so sentimental.”

Altair turned back around to look at Malik and shrugged his shoulders. “Tell me what you need of me, Malik and I will do my best to give it to you.” 

Malik’s passive face turned dark-and-vicious the way it had been in those first few confrontations after the disaster at Solomon’s Temple. Their lives may have been made simpler if Malik had only taken bloody vengeance for the things that he had lost rather than letting the knowledge fester in the silence between them for so long. “I need the Assassin you were raised to be, Altair. I need the man that was stronger and faster and more ruthless than I.”

Yes, Altair could find that man in the chaotic twist of his memories.

\----&\----

Desmond-and-Shaun together wouldn’t have proven much of a threat against Altair at his prime. They barely stood much of a chance against him now, but Altair was content to be limited to the hollowed-out building over their heads and the rain-soaked ground outside of it. Desmond-and-Shaun were discontent to be sent out on a mission to retrieve a single living Templar to be returned to them for interrogation purposes. Altair had sent them on the mission with the same obnoxious authority he had used when he stood as a Master Assassin at Masyaf. There was simply no room or any point in trying to disobey him. In their absence, Malik was set at Altair’s baby-sitter and spent his time above ground running circles to give Altair something to run-faster-than. They sparred in mud. Altair smashed his elbow into Malik’s face and looked-down-at him when he hit the ground.

Altair walked around him slowly, watching as he got to his knees and pinched the bridge of his nose where the smell of blood was so strong it was wonder it wasn’t rolling down his face. “Are you a romantic, Malik?” He tilted his head to one side as he came to a dull stop and didn’t bother to assume a defensive stance as Malik go to his feet. “You asked if I believed in soul mates.”

“I asked if Wren believed in soul mates,” Malik said. He spit watery-blood to the side and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a swollen knot of pain over his cheek and a deeper-set pain at his nose. He balled his fists up and found his footing in the mud. 

“I see no point in pretending you were ever speaking to Wren. You knew he was only temporary, everything you said to him was meant for me. I was listening, I heard everything.” Of course he had, trapped somewhere just under Wren’s skin where the nightmare of his life had driven the poor kid to the point of insanity. “I can only assume that if you’re deflecting that the answer is yes.”

Malik missed swords. He had been proficient at swords, better than even Altair. It was, perhaps, the only thing that he had ever been truly proud of. The other things that he could do had been as expected but his swordsmanship had always excelled. And he wanted nothing more than to knock the smugness out of Altair’s expression. “I don’t believe in soul mates,” Malik said, “to say we are soul mates simply because we were reborn at the same time is ludicrous. Should we consider Abbas a soul mate as well?”

“But you came for me, regardless.”

Malik shrugged. He took a step and Altair took a step. They turned circles in the mud as it started to sprinkle again. The rain brought the chill in the air to a sharp point and Malik’s skin started to hurt from how cold it had gone. “If you have a point, you should state it clearly.”

Altair didn’t move to attack him, but stepped forward so that Malik had to step back until he ran out of space and found himself pressed against an outside wall. Altair didn’t cage him into place but he could have and the arrogance of that knowledge was all over his face. “I have no conclusion yet, just facts that I have gathered.” Then he nodded toward the entrance to the basement, “we should go in.”

\--

Shaun came to the basement to inform them they had caught a Templar and sent them up to the dark and sooty interior of the building above them. Desmond was guarding the Templar as he sat on the soggy ground with his head lolling loosely forward and blood drying around the edge of his mouth. There was a bruise across his face that looked swollen-and-fresh but the whole rest of him was as untouched as possible. 

“I’d rather not be here,” Desmond spoke to Malik but he wasn’t looking at him. His stare was fixed on the blank-and-violent whiteness of Altair’s face. Then at the knife that Altair had brought with him. “Shaun said he’s mid-level so he should know something useful. Just…just come get me when you’re finished.” He walked off when Malik nodded in agreement.

The Templar woke up enough to look at them, his groggy eyes focused in on Altair and then at him and there was a pink-drain of blood from his cheeks as he realized where he was and what was to happen to him. “I’ll tell you nothing,” he said.

“You go first,” Altair said, “I always kill them too quickly.”

Malik didn’t smile because he did not enjoy what was to be done. Altair moved to the side and Malik reached down to drag the man to his feet as he protested with ineffectual twists-and-jerks of his body. “You will tell me everything about where Thomas Grand is hiding,” Malik said.

“I will tell you nothing,” the man said. Because men could be so very brave-and-so-very foolish when they were sure of their own death.

\--

Altair killed the man when he had given them everything he knew. His blood was on Malik’s skin and soaked into his clothes. Across the empty space they were standing in, Altair looked as if he had bathed in the man’s blood. It was in his hair and across his still-bruised face and in a wash over his hands so that it soaked his shirt up to the elbows. There was a puddle that soaked his knees in blood. Altair stood over the body with a sigh and looked down at the short-knife in his fist and then over at him. 

“This is what you want from me?” he said. 

Malik did not look at the man’s twisted-and-torn open body. He didn’t think of his grunts and cries of pain. He had blocked out and already forgotten the pitiful shrieks as he begged for a swift and merciful death. He remembered only the slow-pained drag of his words as he gave over the information they had asked for and the relief on his face when death was finally granted. “No,” Malik said, “but it is what we must both be for now.”

There was age in Altair’s stance now, something that weighed down his shoulders and changed his face. Malik might never have met the man who now stood in front of him, but he recognized the brittle indecision. “I hope that we have the wisdom in this life to walk away when it’s time.” He looked disgusted at the blood, at himself, at the body in front of him. 

\--

Desmond looked bone-pale when Malik and Altair returned to the basement. Rebecca was conspicuously absent and Shaun announced that she’d gone to get food while they were attending to their business. Altair disappeared into the little bathroom without a word and Malik was moving to follow after him when he just-barely heard Shaun say, “I’ll take care of it, Desmond.”

“I brought him here,” Desmond said in his own defense, “I might as well have the decency to finish what I started.”

Then Malik was in the thin room with the small bathtub and the weak shower. The water was always cold but it ran clear and it worked to get them clean. Altair stood naked under the stream as the blood ran off his skin and swirled around the drain. His eyes were closed and his head was hanging forward. Malik shed his clothes and stuffed them into the same trash bag Altair had put his in before he put them out the door to be taken away with the corpse they’d left. Then he stepped into the shower. 

\--

The Templar told them of Thomas Grand’s paranoia. He rarely moved out in the open, stayed cloistered indoors in the company of others. He sank himself into the news, watched for patterns—for signs of the inevitable end he knew was coming. Abstergo (the Templar said) had bought the man with assurances of a greater peace and Thomas had given himself over so very easily. 

Thomas was in the fourth floor of a six story hotel, in a room on a corner with only one narrow window.

“We need to know what the room looks like on the inside,” Altair said, “we need to know what the buildings around the hotel are. We need to have some idea of how many people he keeps with him. The Templar only said he was never alone but he could not give us a number.”

“I can get you information about the hotel room,” Rebecca said.

“We can go see what buildings there are around it,” Desmond offered. “Or I can if Shaun doesn’t want to go too.”

“I’ll go,” Shaun said. “I wouldn’t want you out there by yourself.”

Desmond gave him the finger; Shaun just grinned at him. 

\--

The next day passed in a crawl. Altair climbed the building both inside and out and fell several times with curses breaking through his clenched teeth as he looked at the broken skin on his soft hands with some great sense of betrayal. 

Malik joined him and fared only slightly better. His own hands had begun to grow the necessary calluses but they were nowhere near as thick or useful as they needed to be. He was stronger-than Altair, though, with a greater sense of control over his own body. 

When Altair tired of falling, he sat on a fallen beam inside of the old building and said, “you don’t think I know what I want. Is it because you don’t know what you want?”

“I didn’t. Not when I was so new to this world, not when I couldn’t sort out the things I thought and felt from memories.” He was standing, not sitting, and Altair looked strange looking _up_ at him when he had always been taller. “I know what I want. I want to finish this mission, and I want to find the Italian bitch that kept me like a dog and then I will walk away and be done with this life. Do I know if I want what you want from me? No, I do not know.”

Altair was silent at that and Malik was glad for it.

\--

Shaun came back with a series of photographs and a hand-drawn map. (It wasn’t very terrible either, if a bit rudimentary.) Desmond explained the ‘feel’ of the streets to them, the number of people and the amount of traffic to contend with. 

“There’s a hotel, a walking mall and then an office building that is still under construction. The main structure is done, they seem to be working on the cosmetics inside at this point. It sits at an angle from the hotel but there’s a clear line of sight from that building to the hotel room that Thomas is in. From what we could see from the street, the window is fairly open if somewhat small.” Shaun said. He showed them the pictures he had taken of those buildings.

“It’s a standard hotel room,” Rebecca added, “the window is in the sleeping part, there’s a little sitting area and a kitchenette and a bathroom. One big room—exactly like you’d imagine.” She had pictures of the hotel room on her laptop that she showed them and then a schematic of the entire building. “The problem is that from what I can tell, almost every room around Thomas is taken up by either an Assassin or a Templar. He has a cluster of Assassins staying in the rooms around him and then the floor below and the floor above are both taken up by Templars. They hotel may as well be hosting an Abstergo conference for how many of the names show up in their employment records.”

“Am I still the top story on the news?” Malik asked.

“There have been no new leads so you’re the second story,” Rebecca said. “The top story is some national scandal involving a senator and this married woman. It’s not even that exciting but it bumped you out so go Senator sex scandals, I guess.”

“I don’t see how we’re going to get to this target,” Desmond said. He looked defeated before they had even begun. “He doesn’t come out of the room, he doesn’t allow guests—he’s literally surrounded by men willing to die for him.”

“Everyone opens the door for room service,” Altair said. He was looking at the map and the pictures on Shaun’s phone as if he were trying to work out how to bend them to his will. There simply was no way to gain access to the building without going in through the door and exposing themselves to the many varied methods of paranoid surveillance in this new age. 

“So who wants to dress up like a maid?” Desmond asked. “Even if we got into the room, there’s no reason to honestly believe we could silently take out how many ever men are inside and then walk out without getting caught.”

“Yes, thank you Desmond. We cannot possibly accomplish this mission. You’ve been such a help, please do tell us if there’s anything else you’d like to add.” The pink frustration on Shaun’s face was an interesting twist to his usual placid indifference. He had never been interested-or-concerned about the planning portion of any mission. His involvement was limited to delivering knowledge and keeping tabs on them during the mission. 

“He’s right,” Rebecca said defensively.

Malik took the pictures from Altair’s hands and the map that Shaun had made. They marked the corner of the hotel where Thomas Grand was hiding. There was a direct line from the office building and the window— “Do we know a sniper?” Malik asked.

“Do I know one?” Rebecca said, “yes. Can I get one here, right now? No. I think you’re underestimating the clusterfuck that we have created. Not only is Abstergo closely monitoring how this turns out, every Assassin in the immediate vicinity has been informed that Malik has abandoned the Creed and is out for himself. We are wanted by literally everyone: Templar, Assassins and Civilians.”

“Then we need a way into the room,” Altair said. 

“That’s impossible,” Desmond said (again).

“Do you have anything actually helpful to add?” Rebecca demanded. “We’re all aware that it’s impossible, you don’t have to keep pointing it out. Let someone who is actually trying to solve the problem talk for once.”

And Altair was frowning at them as they argued, his shoulders going boxy and stiff in a way that was decidedly dangerous. Malik dropped the papers on the table and tried to talk over them as they bickered the noise of their ceaseless voices got louder-and-louder. Desmond defended his position and Rebecca fought back like a trapped animal. 

A sharp-slap of skin-on-table top interrupted their shouting and Shaun said, “I hate to interrupt this delightful conversation but I am, in fact, trained as a sniper. If we can get someone inside this room,” he stabbed his finger on the X drawn on the map, “to open the window and if we can get the target to stand at the window I can finish this.”

“You’re a sniper,” Rebecca repeated. The disbelief was a crude laugh in her voice.

“No, you’re not,” Desmond said.

“The Italian Brotherhood is very strict about the practice of using firearms. Nobody is allowed that isn’t willing to shoot someone. I prefer the cleaner, safer long distance approach. Well, actually I prefer not to do it at all but if I must, I prefer being very far away. The trouble is that we do not have a sniper rifle.” Shaun wasn’t looking-at-Malik when he should have been because they had spent months of their lives in close quarters while they were all-but-held hostage by the Italian Brotherhood. No he was looking at Desmond now, or Rebecca or the neutral space between their bodies. 

“You think I have one?” Desmond asked when Shaun looked at him a half-minute too long.

“I think if you made a long-overdue call to your father we could have a rifle in a matter of hours. Rebecca could easily pose as a maid and open the curtains which leaves you two,” he said looking back at Altair (but not Malik), “to come up with a reason for the target to come to the window.”

\--

It wasn’t any sense of kindness that motivated Malik’s caution but the nagging sense that something-was-missing. This bit of information about Shaun was as shocking to him as it was to Desmond-and-Rebecca who were chewing it over in silence with now-and-again outbursts of disbelief. Rebecca asked him once (while Shaun was out) if he had known about it and Malik didn’t answer her because he had no answer at all.

“Is he so important to you?” Altair asked. He was lounging on their bed, ready to sleep for the night, but Malik could not force his body into a relaxed state. 

So he stood and paced and tried to piece together all the bits of things that he had ever known about Shaun. Shaun-the-technician. Shaun-the-translator. Shaun-the-weak and willing. Shaun who did nothing as often as he hid from confrontation that was bigger than a mistake on a computer screen. There was simply nothing lethal about Shaun. But-there-was-something missing and it was stuck in the back of his head like splinter that refused to be worked free. 

Altair sat with his legs crossed in front of him now, with his hands resting in his lap. He wasn’t an embodiment of arrogance but a pretty picture of patient interest. “Malik,” he said softly, “should we worry?”

Oh-and-what must it be like to be so _new_ to this world? What must it have been like when he was kept in a square room with white walls? He remembered nothing before the Italian Brotherhood, before Rosario’s stern disapproval and the barrage of faces-and-things that sent him into a tailspin of headaches-and-puking sickness. He had spent weeks in a haze and only crawled out of it because of Shaun. Shaun who had simply existed in his space for as long as he could remember. Shaun who he trusted because of the familiar sound of his words. 

“Stay,” Malik said. He went through the rooms, to the stairs that led up to the cool night air. It was dark inside of the building but there was a round moon in the sky that cast a silvery-light across the ground. Shaun was crouching with his back against the wall and a cigarette glowing red-orange in his mouth. He looked over at Malik without even the most polite imitation of shock.

“I expected you would bring him as well,” Shaun said. He was speaking Arabic, of course, the way he had since the very first minute that Malik remembered him. His sweater was ratty with filth and the collar of his shirt was sweat-stained and wrinkled. He moved to stand at his full height. 

“Should I have brought him?” Malik asked.

“I have no illusions about you, Malik. I am not as naïve as the others, you know.” He flicked the cigarette out into the cool grass and tucked his hands into the pockets of his pants. But here, his shoulders didn’t slump and his posture didn’t shift so easily to defeat. 

“What illusions do they have?” Malik asked.

“Abbas thought you were weak. Rosario thought you were feeble. Abstergo thought you were useless. Rebecca thinks you’re dull. Desmond thinks you’re noble. I’m not sure what Altair thinks of you but I have to assume that what he knows about you is something far closer to the truth.” While he talked he watched Malik stepping closer to him without reacting, as if he were suddenly so brave there was no threat that could make him cringe and hide.

There-was-something missing, some part of Shaun’s story that didn’t sit with the reality that Malik-had-lived. They hadn’t known each other for long (not very long at all) but there were only a handful of days in eight months that Malik hadn’t spent in this man’s presence. “And what do you know about me?” 

Shaun was looking at his body, not at his face. There was no fear in the way he rearranged his limbs to defend himself. There was no hesitant whimpering in his voice—as if he had nothing left to lose here (of all places). “You’re an Assassin. Yesterday, you tortured a man to death for information. Altair had nightmares and you only woke up when he did.”

“He was not a good man,” Malik said.

There was a derisive little noise then, Shaun turned his head out toward the nothing at the edges of the building and then looked back at him with a shake of his head. “He was a man who believed something different than you.”

“He was a man who understood he was going to die. He chose to resist even after he knew what we were willing to do to him. The information he had wasn’t worth the pain he was willing to endure to keep it. What kind of information do you have?” Malik-hadn’t-ever enjoyed hurting people, he hadn’t ever enjoyed killing the people he’d been sent to kill but he could put it where it belonged in the recesses of his mind and leave it there. The things that haunted Altair were bigger-and-brighter and far worse than the things that had haunted Malik. 

“I am exactly who I was a moment ago. I am still Shaun, your humble translator who still wants to be your friend. I am an Assassin. I am here to keep you safe despite how difficult you make that. It’s just that there have been many years of my life that came before you. I was trained as a sniper before you were rescued, and I am adamantly opposed to using those skills.”

“Why now?” Malik asked. 

“If I don’t do this, Altair or you will figure out a way to get into that building and you won’t make it out again. I can’t allow that to happen.”

Malik was close enough now that Shaun’s dirty sweater was a stink in his face and the nervous flinch of his pulse was clearly visible. He stayed close-like-that, crowded in against polite distance until Shaun relented with a stumbling-step backward. “There is something else,” Malik said. “I can feel it like something I’ve forgotten. What will I find when I remember it?”

“The day you killed Abbas, they took me to a room with no windows and they hit me for hours. Every time they asked me what happened I told them the same thing. Abbas was mortally wounded before you shot him. They kept me awake for hours and they hit me every time I fell asleep. I stood in front of Rosario naked and bruised and I swore to her that Abbas would have died no matter what happened.” And it was every-single-word true, with Shaun staring right at him as he spoke. “Whatever you find, remember I was willing to die.”

Malik meant to hit him and the way Shaun’s whole body braced for the impact mirrored that intention, but he found himself dragging the man into a violent kiss. It was-as-shocking and as-painful as hitting him might have been. Shaun let out a startled noise against his mouth and put both hands on his shoulders like he meant to shove him back but he didn’t. For the briefest-of-seconds Shaun’s hands were too-tight on his arms and then they loosened and his arms slid around his back to hug around his body. Shaun-was-taller than him and thinner and lighter. His glasses were a strange obstacle but his mouth was wet-and-warm and smoke-flavored. 

It was one-two steps until Shaun’s back hit something solid again and Malik’s hands were working under his clothes to feel the heat of his skin. Shaun murmured another noise at that, slid one of his hands up to the sweat-damp hair at the nape of Malik’s neck and the other around his lower back to bring him closer. 

“Altair,” Shaun said when he’d recovered enough brain function to object. He pushed Malik away from his body with one hand and rubbed his face with the other. There was something-like-pain on his face when he spoke again (only softer). “I’m not being noble, I am being practical. I don’t want to die a hideously painful death.” He tipped his head forward enough to bump his forehead against Malik’s.

It-was-too much, to be close to feeling something real and _present_ that he’d felt purely-on-his own and not picked from random out of his memory. It was too much to have some half-remembered thing hanging in his head. It was too much to have both hands on Shaun’s body and no way to really _touch_ him. Malik pulled back and Shaun tugged his shirt down to straighten it out, looking disappointed and determined all at once. 

Malik hit him, (once), as hard as he dared. The contact of fist-on-face was a dizzy white shock of pain in his knuckles that echoed in the sharp yelp of surprise Shaun made as his body rolled against the ruined wall of the building. “He’ll be expecting it,” Malik said when Shaun looked at him with blood in his mouth like he expected an explanation. “I’m only being practical.”


	8. Chapter 8

Altair-had-seen, had-felt, had-touched madness before. It had crawled into his life time-and-time again with its sweet-song that called to him the way a wave called to the shore. Come-to-me, it had always said to him, _come and be free with me_. Al Mualim had accused him once of being immune, but Altair had never been far from the point of madness. 

In the dark, when the nightmares came for him again, he crawled out of bed and crept to his freedom in the wide-open air. He found a comfortable corner of the broken building to lay in and pillowed his head on his arms crossed behind it. The vastness of the world was crashing into the tender edges of his sense and he could feel every little thing that made _him_ begin to unravel.

\--

It was Shaun-not-Malik that found him. It was Shaun-not-Malik that stood a considerate distance away from him. He was wearing a flimsy-white tank top that clung to his too-thin body in a way that was nearly indecent. There were goose bumps everywhere his milk-white skin was exposed. His hands were tucked neatly into the pockets of his pants as he kicked at a bit of debris along the ground. 

Altair sat up and crossed his legs loosely in front of him. Shaun had the advantage of height but Altair had the advantage of the natural fear that had festered in the space between Shaun’s shoulders.

“I know you saw last night. We finish this mission first,” Shaun said. When he looked away from the floor, looked up at Altair, there was no sly motive in his face. The rest of his body might have been feeble but his-eyes were made of dangerous things. Shaun-knew-and-Shaun-saw and Shaun-heard more-than anyone of them. He could pick up the threads they dropped and pull them together and that made him worth the burden of keeping him. 

“What do you imagine I would do to you?” Altair asked.

“I’d rather not imagine.” There was no guilt, at least. Shaun looked at him with an even temper. They were both men and they were both useful in their own ways. Except Shaun knew the way Malik didn’t seem to understand that Altair was never-going-to-change his mind. There was no version of himself that was going to let Malik go without fighting for him first. 

Altair shrugged. “You have done enough yourself. Malik will not come to you again.” He rose back to his feet and dusted away the dirt from where it clung to his pants and the back of his jacket. When he was clean (enough) he straightened again and reached forward to touch the dark bruise on Shaun’s face. It-was-curious how the man stood so still and let him do it, how he did not flinch or fidget or try to step out of his reach. He simply stood and let the tender spot be pressed, never once even looking away from Altair’s face. “You made him very angry.”

“It was a calculated risk. His anger is a bruise on my face. Your anger is my intestines on the floor.” Shaun pulled his hands out of his pockets and rubbed his fingers across the bruise. There was something-Shaun-wanted to say but he didn’t. His silence was pronounced in the distrustful shift of his eyes before he motioned backward, “they should be waking up.”

“I will be here,” Altair said.

“Of course you will.” Then Shaun was walking back toward the hellish little hole in the ground.

\--

Malik brought him food and when Altair did not react to take it from his outstretched hand he dropped it in the debris on the floor. His footsteps were tired shuffles toward the empty windows and the sunlight that had finally brightened the world beyond. He was dressed in his modern-man clothes: black pants and a black jacket with a hood that hung at his shoulders. His hair was a mess at the top of his head and his face was darkened by the unshaven scruff of many days. 

The food was a scatter of processed bits in dirt and Altair curled his lip at it. Wren had been mad about that sort of thing. (Then again, he had been like a goat: a creature that would eat anything presented to it.) Altair kicked it away and settled back against the wall he had been leaning against.

“You’re a child,” Malik said. A child for being so easily hurt, a child for sneaking after the adults just to see what they were doing, a child for sulking in a far corner. 

Altair laughed at the accusation. “If I am a child for my disappointment you are a child for your impulsive antagonizing. I could believe you would love a man like Shaun. I might believe that you had harbored physical attraction for him or even that you had already had sex with him. If not for how long I have known you.”

“Is it so unbelievable?” Malik turned to look at him then. His right shoulder back against the broken edge of the window frame and his arms across his chest. The whole posture was defensive save for the perfectly placid set of his face. 

“You could not love Shaun. I cannot imagine you would try to bed him either.” Altair brought one of his knees up to rest his arm against, gestured loosely into the air where Shaun had come and then gone. “He is not good enough. He is not fast enough, he is not strong enough, and he is not smart enough to suit you. The whole of your life has been spent becoming better. I cannot imagine you would settle now.”

Malik rolled his eyes at him. 

Oh-but-“You know I am right, Malik.” Because-he-was. And Malik’s side-eyed glare was enough proof on the matter. The thrill of victory that shot through Altair’s chest had nothing-at-all to do with doing away with an enemy and everything to do with the way Malik’s glare lingered on him a half-second too long. His response was silence as he walked away again.

\--

Desmond-and-Rebecca were gone when Altair ventured back down in the dark little room to search for something to eat. The grumbling of his stomach seemed to power the spiraling madness of his thoughts and he could not ignore the two for another moment. He picked through the packages of things stacked on and under the table, tucked between the boxes that housed the electronics that Rebecca-and-Shaun held in such high regard. 

He found bread and balled two slices up in one fist. He ate it in three bites and found a bottle of water to wash it down his throat when it got tacky and stuck. Then there was a little plastic cup full of syrup and fruit that he drank as he looked through the other junk and tried to find anything that seemed palatable. 

Shaun came out of the bathroom shivering. He was shirtless, carrying his glasses in one hand and wearing nothing but his thin-black-boxers that were caught against his thighs where they were still wet. He dropped his clothes on one chair and slipped his glasses back on his face. For a moment he looked nearly-embarrassed with a blush of pink on his cheeks and the tops of his pale-boxy shoulders. “I thought you were up there,” he said.

Altair pulled a pack of peanut butter crackers out of the stack of food. “I was hungry,” he said. 

Shaun’s chest was flat but fairly broad and his stomach was flat with only the barest hint of real muscle. There were scars across his right side that looked something like knife wounds and raised-pink scar on his thigh above the knee that was most definitely a bullet wound. 

“You were not trained for combat,” Altair said.

“No. I was trained for self-defense and running. I am very good at running.” He flipped his pants out and made a face at the smell of having worn them for many days. “I know quite a bit about history, conspiracies, and computers. I’ve got a working knowledge of biology, psychology, astronomy and literature. I could offer you the full resume.” He had stepped into his pants and pulled them up to his waist, stopping there to lean across the table and turn one of the computers toward him. 

“Did you get your scars from the library?”

“You are hilarious. I cannot imagine why Malik would not be swooning at your wit.” Shaun hit a few keys and then straightened again with a frustrated frown. “Is it too much to ask for a decent signal in this awful place? So much for maintain high-speed quality in any location.” He buttoned his pants and dug through the pile of his clothes for the same dirty undershirt he’d been wearing earlier. “If you must know. I was shot by a faithful employee of Abstergo when I was recruited into the Assassins. They’ve either got terrible aim or I am very lucky—the prevailing theory is terrible aim. These,” he said spreading his hand across the scars on his lower right chest. “Are from Malik. He doesn’t remember that, of course. He doesn’t remember most of it in the beginning. When Lucy got him out he was a raving madman. We had to keep him sedated for days and when he woke up he killed four people in three days.”

Altair ate another cracker. “Why you?”

Shaun pulled his shirt on and fussed with the collar until it was straight on the back of his neck. “I don’t know. The general theory is that I spoke the language he was most familiar with.” He was half-done buttoning his shirt when the screen on the computer changed and he made a pleased noise as he leaned forward to stare into the screen again. His smug-looking-smile turned into a dour-frown as he looked at the screen and the pleased-pink tint of his cheeks went red. “Fucking William Miles,” he said.

“What?” Altair asked. He went around to stand at Shaun’s side. There was a picture of Lucy with her head down and silver cuffs on her hands behind her back large against the black print that faded in and out of meaning. 

“Go find Malik,” Shaun said. He slapped the computer shut and turned around to grab a bag off the ground. “He went toward the trees. Find him and bring him back here as quickly as you can.”

“Tell me why,” Altair said.

Shaun threw the bag he’d picked up against the table and knocked the assembled food out of its careful towers. It hit the ground in a serious of dull thumps and sharp-metal snaps. “Because Lucy Stillman saved his life and it’s about time he returned the damn favor. If that doesn’t motivate him, maybe tell him that William Miles makes Rosario look like a kitten.” He didn’t bother to watch Altair to see if he meant to do what he was asked but started shoving things into his bag. He stopped long enough to go into the other room and grab the bag of weapons they kept by the beds. 

Shaun threw the bag of weapons at Altair who only barely managed to catch it without dropping his crackers. 

\--

Malik wasn’t in the trees but sitting beneath them drawing Jerusalem with a blunt little stick. The details were etched into the dirt with precise little scribbles that had fallen into little pock marks in the soil. Even here, where nobody would ever see or use the map, Malik was frowning as he worked. The crease in his brows betrayed the level of concentration he was using and the way he sighed was exactly-the-same as he’d always sighed when Altair found and interrupted him.

“William Miles makes Rosario look like a kitten,” Altair said. He dropped the bag in the dirt just centimeters beyond Malik’s hand. “Shaun sent me to find you. This is what he said would motivate you.”

Malik straightened his posture, tipped his head back to look at him and squinted into the sun that rose high-above-Altair’s head. “Then he has a mission,” Malik said.

“Yes,” Altair said.

Malik nodded and then pulled the bag across the ruined map to choose his weapons.

\--

Shaun met them in the field beyond the hellish little underground pit they were crouching in. “William knows where we are, so we’re leaving.” They didn’t run but walked like running until they hit a road. They walked for half-an-hour before the rumble of approaching tires brought certain relief. “We’re going to need this ride,” Shaun said.

Malik looked back over his shoulder at the car and then grabbed Altair and pulled him out in the middle of the road. The car screeched to a stop as it skidded into the gravel-and-rocks on the right of the road. Shaun jogged the distance from where he’d stopped and the driver side door but Malik went over the car with a fluid motion and yanked the door open. Altair watched him reach in and pull the frightened-young-man out and throw him into the weeds at the side of the road. 

“Give me your phone,” Shaun said.

“No I’m not,” the boy (he could not be considered a man) started to say but Malik pulled a gun and pointed at his face with a look of no mercy. The boy stopped suddenly and started shaking as he pulled his phone and his wallet and a tube of lip balm out of his pockets and handed it all to Shaun. “Take it,” he said, “take whatever.”

Shaun pulled the phone to pieces and Malik hit the kid in the temple with enough force to knock him out before he dragged him out of the path of vehicles. Shaun threw his phone and his wallet back over to him. “Get in,” Shaun said with a wave of his arm toward the vehicle.

\--

They drove back into town, through a dozen side-streets that ended in the broken-down part of the city where the buildings had gone without renovation since the sixties. The sidewalks and the roads were cracked and broken anywhere they were not outright slanted and dipped. Shaun found an old building with a few cars parked outside of it to stop. 

“What is this?” Altair asked.

Shaun let out a breath and reached into his pocket to pull out his phone. He went through a few screens and then held it up so they could see it. “Frank Beau. He works transport for Abstergo. By transport I mean he picks up and moves people that are considered high-risk. He was not considered a credible target because he is a moron, but he is a vicious moron. One of you needs to convince him to let you ride along when he picks up Lucy Stillman from the police station.”

“No,” Malik said. He was sitting in center of the backseat with one of his hands curled around Altair’s seat so he could keep himself pulled forward far enough to see the screen. His voice was unrelenting in its denial. 

“What do we do after we convince him?” Altair asked.

“You kill him and you bring Lucy to the unfinished office building by the hotel. Tell her nothing about what we have planned. If you get cornered or caught—kill her. Under no circumstances should you let her be taken by Assassins or Templars.” Shaun shut his phone off and reached into the bag he’d dropped on the floor by Altair’s feet to pull a spare phone out. “Call if something happens.”

“You’re not going,” Malik snapped.

“I am,” Altair said. He opened the door and got out of the car as it started. Malik followed him, grabbed his arm and turned him around to slam him against the side of it. “Know your place,” Altair snapped at him.

“My place is keeping you from doing stupid things,” Malik said back. “This woman delivered you to them. Why would you risk your life to save hers now?” 

But was the world so-black-and-white? Altair put his hand on Malik’s shoulder over the furious tightness of tendon-and-muscle. “You forget who I married, Malik. If I were to eliminate every person that ever led me to danger I would have nobody in my life. There are things we do not know. I am not going because I believe Lucy needs to be saved, I am going because you trust Shaun.”

Oh-and-Malik’s face went pale at those words and his furious expression crumbled into something far-less sure. Perhaps he had never-been-asked to trust someone more than he trusted his own biased gut in this strange world. Perhaps he had never been asked to acknowledge the obvious trust he had in the other man. “Do not put your own life in danger,” Malik said to him.

“I will see you soon, brother,” Altair said.

“Safety and peace,” Malik said back. Then he moved away, got back into the car and left Altair standing in the broken parking lot looking at the squat little building across the street with a single black car in front of it. 

\--

Altair entered through an open window on the second floor in the back of the building. Inside it smelled like aftershave and vanilla air-freshener. The floors were stripped bare of carpet but left unfinished and the walls were riddled with holes and dents and streaks were the paint had been scratched and never fixed. The door was crooked on its hinges and the floor creaked even as Altair tried-so-very-hard to creep across it quietly. 

There was the distant sound of TV news so loudly Altair could be reasonable sure that the slight creaks-and-moans of the floor had gone unnoticed. He followed the sound of the TV past the open doors of the hall and down the stairs around a blind corner in the hall. The stairs were sturdy concrete with dirty-metal banisters that had sharp edges where the grips had rubbed off. 

Down-and-down, until he was looking around the doorframe and into the open area of the downstairs. There were glass windows that covered the front of the building and a series of empty desks set in crooked lines across the open lobby. A sign was hanging from the ceiling by one metal chain and one dusty rope and behind it there was a flimsy white wall covered in old flyers and posters. 

The TV was louder here, coming from somewhere beyond the wall. He crept out slowly, listening for the sound of a living-thing and finding nothing but the grating noise of a prompted TV audience in uproarious laughter. 

“I don’t like the TV either.” Frank Beau was sitting at a desk set back from the corner in such a way Altair could not have seen him until the stepped out far enough to be seen. He was hunched forward with a grim frown and a spread of cards on the desk in front of him. There were no obvious weapons within reach save for a small black cell phone. “It’s noisy. It makes it hard to hear things.”

Altair walked over to him (there simply was no reason not to seeing how he’d been caught). 

“So it’s you,” Frank sat back and set the little deck of cards he’d been playing solitaire with on the desk. There was a holster under his jacket and a thin silver knife under where his arm had been a moment ago. Frank leaned to the left and considered him.

Altair stood on the other side of the desk. Frank was not tall but thickly muscled under the neat cut of his clothes. His face was clean but unshaven with little dips and valleys where teenage acne might have ruined his skin. One of his eyes drifted too far outward and his nose had been broken (more than once, most likely). There were scratches on the back of his hands and a small Templar cross tattooed on his left ring finger. “It is me. This would be much simpler if you’d give up now.”

Frank laughed at that. He rubbed his finger along the top of his ear and then wiped it across the dirty arm of the chair he sat in. “Things would be much simpler if things like you didn’t exist. There’s something dirty and wrong about the things technology can do these days, you know? First, it’s automatic bread makers and everyone’s happy because you don’t have to knead it and then it’s television and VCRs and phones you can carry in your pocket. But then there’s things like you.”

Altair considered indulging the conversation. It was a practical method of stalling, a semi effective method of learning something about your opponent that could save your life but mostly it was time-consuming. The sound of Frank’s voice droning in English made it hard to concentrate on the way his body moved or the speed of his breath or a thousand-more-useful things. 

When he moved forward, Frank moved back, kicking the chair out from under him and standing. His arms weren’t raised in submission but lifted in defense. Altair stepped up onto the chair, then the desk and kicked Frank hard in the jaw. Frank grabbed his leg and dragged him downward when he fell. They hit the floor with a resounding crash and an animal scramble to get back to their feet. 

Frank’s grip on his leg was tight-and-strong as he dragged Altair across the ground toward him. His grin was sure and bloody as he groped through the air for the desk just beyond his reach. Altair let himself be dragged, struggled and scratched at the dirty floor even as Frank got a hand on his throat and went for the gun in his pocket.

Altair slapped his palm against Frank’s lower-left side and watched his face go white-with-shock as the hidden blade tore through his clothes and under the hard protective vest he wore. The blood was hot on Altair’s wrist as Frank tipped his head down and grabbed at his arm as if he could stop him now that it had been done. Altair knocked him over, laid him flat out on the ground and pulled the blade out of his gut. “You will take me to get Lucy,” he said.

Oh-but Frank was gripping at his bloody wound with his broad hands and staring at his own blood in a brilliant-red wash across his skin. “You little bastard,” he said.

Altair took his gun and hit him across the face with it. “You will take me to Lucy,” he said.

“Why?” Frank demanded.

Altair smiled at him, shoved his knee in against the wound and put the full of his weight on it. He leaned forward enough to look at the red-and-white spots of color on the man’s face as he shoved at him to relieve the pressure. “Because the wound is not fatal, my mission was not to kill you but there are many more ways I can hurt you.”

\--

Lucy walked out of the police station with her right arm in a sling and a litter of bruises up her throat and across her face that were too-fresh to be the ones he had left there days ago. The white clothes he remembered her wearing had been replaced by casual jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t suit her and her hair had been messily cut to just above her jaw. 

“I thought she was one of you,” Frank said. He was sitting in the driver’s side with one hand raised in the air toward where Lucy stood so that she would recognize-and-come to him. There was a puddle of blood in his lap, soaking into the seat under him and dripping slowly to the floorboard just beneath his feet. The first wound was bandaged but Altair had been obliged to remind him (several times now) that they had one single mission. 

“You don’t look so good,” Lucy said when she got to the driver side of the car.

“Shut up, get in the car,” Frank said.

Lucy tipped her head back and tried to look through the reflective tint on the back window before she nodded her head and went around to the passenger side. She opened the door with a grunt of effort and sat next to the man that she had to have known meant to drive her to a nearly abandoned building to torture and kill her. But she sat with her back straight and dusted a stray bit of something off her lap like nothing-was-wrong in the whole of the world. When she did look at Frank her face didn’t change when she saw the blood soaking into his pants and running down his left arm. “You don’t look good,” she said again.

Altair knocked against the back of Frank’s chair and the car started again. 

Lucy looked back between the seats to where he was laying. There was no relief on her face but the same cold expression—devoid of emotion. “I hope we don’t have far to go with the amount of blood he’s lost.”

“Shut up,” Frank said.

\--

They drove in silence save for when Frank called to inform his handlers he had picked Lucy up and there had been no unwanted interference. The voice on the other end reminded Frank to deliver her to the ‘tower’ and reminded him that something was likely to happen. Frank said he knew how to be careful.

They parked in the auxiliary parking at the nearest hospital. Lucy waited until Altair told her to get out. Altair leaned forward between the seats to see Frank with his pale face leaning against the black of his suit jacket. His cheeks were white and his lips were pale as he blinked sluggishly.

“You lied,” he said.

“I did,” Altair agreed. He sliced the man’s throat and then went out through the back passenger side. He did not grab Lucy’s arm but slid his arm around her back and pulled her toward the other cars that were filling the lot. “We need one,” he said.

“If you’re taking me somewhere to kill me I’d rather you do it here,” she said. But she didn’t shake him off, didn’t try to get away from him. No she walked at his side across the empty parking spaces until she turned with a practiced little twirl and put her back against the car door. Her free hand caught in his clothes and pulled him close enough to be indecent. “Try not to lie to _me_ ,” she said, “am I going to die?”

“My mission is to return you to Shaun. I am only allowed to kill you if we get caught.” When he _looked_ at her, she was a great-many colors: golden as a target, blank and white and gray with red and blue that rippled and twisted straight through her. 

In living colors, her eyes went pink at the edges. “Shaun?” she repeated, “Shaun sent you to get me?”

“Yes,” Altair said.

“Not this car,” she said and she pushed him back far enough to grab his hand with her left and dragged him forward. “Smile,” she said, “look like you love me.” Her own face was alive with joy that did nothing to hide the tense hope set somewhere deep in her chest. They went through the parking lot with her voice high in joyful laughter and his stumbling footsteps following after her. 

An older man saw them and shook his head at their ridiculousness but he moved on in the next moment. Lucy found a car she liked and crawled into it through the unlocked back passenger side door. She let him in and said, “I need one of your knives. I’ll give it back when I finish hotwiring the car.”

He handed it to her and she handed it back after she’d started the car.

\--

They drove in a circle first with Lucy pulling her right arm free from the sling with a little pant of effort. She was checking the mirrors-and-the traffic all around them again-and-again as they made their pointless circle until she must have been satisfied they weren’t being followed. 

“Where are we going?” Lucy asked.

Altair gave her the address. The dull aura of mixed intentions flared bright-red and then dampened into a confusion of colors. “It has been a long time since you have passed a day without being afraid, hasn’t it?”

Lucy did not smile, she did not frown, and she didn’t act surprised or resigned. She just looked forward at the traffic in front of them with the same placid dullness. But her breath came in a little gust of something like hurt. Her voice was quiet—somber, sincere. “It was a Tuesday. The rain was unbelievable that day. The power went out and I was so angry because I couldn’t keep track of the news. I didn’t have access to the information that I needed to stay safe. This was before we met up with Rebecca again. It was just Desmond and I in this shitty little safe house—that’s what I told him. It was after he detoxed off the pills, when he lucid again and he was starting to understand everything that Abstergo had done to him.” She made a slow right turn at a yellow light and frowned at the rearview mirror. Altair looked back through the space between the seats and saw nothing but a line of cars that looked too similar to recognize. “It was cold, I guess. He was walking around with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and he found me cursing at my phone because I couldn’t get a decent signal. He just kind of looked at me and then held the blanket up at his sides and flapped his arms. It was so stupid, he said ‘caw, caw’ and I thought the drugs must have finally fried his brain. I was trying to figure out what I was supposed to do if he turned out to be completely useless, you know. What would be morally right, what would be expected of me, what he might have wanted if he still had enough brain to make decisions. Then he frowned at me and said, ‘you really have to learn how laugh again’. He must have told me a hundred stupid jokes and I started laughing because I needed him to like me and not just for my job but because he was a good guy. It wasn’t a whole day but for a few hours, I wasn’t afraid of anything.”

She was frightened at that moment though, as she looked in the mirror again and saw something that made her take an abrupt left across oncoming traffic. They bumped crudely into a parking lot and did a tight circle to face outward again. Altair was hanging on to the door and the center console at being jostled so roughly but Lucy was holding her breath as she watched the traffic.

“Swear to me that you’ll kill me if we get caught,” Lucy said. 

“You have my word,” Altair said. Then Lucy was pulling out in front of a school bus and hitting the accelerator so hard the car lurched forward with a high growl.

The went in another series of pointless twists and turns before Lucy ditched the car in a fast food parking lot and motioned him closer to her. She slid her arm around his back and ducked her head against her chest as the wind from the traffic knocked against their backs. “When is the last time you weren’t afraid?”

“I was in a library,” Altair said.

\---&\---

Shaun left the car in a mall parking lot miles from the tower. He handed Malik his glasses and reached up to flatten his hair down toward his head before he motioned them toward the first entrance of the mall. “Try hard not to look like you’d rather be killing people. And try not to talk about killing people.”

“It will be very difficult,” Malik said. “A pair of glasses will not make me instantly unrecognizable.”

“You’d be surprised how often it works,” Shaun said. Then he took them to the food court, around a trash can that smelled like tacos and pizza rolled up in chicken fried rice, to the ATM. Malik leaned against it and Shaun glared at it while he pressed the buttons and cursed it for being slow and stupid until it spit money out at him. Then he pushed that into his pocket and took Malik’s hand. “He said you’d never try to kiss me again,” Shaun said. His tone was light-and-silly. 

“Your opinion of the kiss was easy enough to understand,” Malik said. He allowed himself to led through the mall to a clothes store with obnoxious ads playing over their heads. He frowned and stopped at the mouth of the store while Shaun’s glasses made things go from painfully clear to dull and fuzzy and back again depending on how Malik moved his eyes.

There was a curious woman at the register that watched as Shaun pouted at him and then used the grip he had on Malik’s arm to pull himself back up against Malik’s body. He was close enough to smell the stink of his unwashed clothes and feel the quiet brush of his breath. “My opinion of the kiss has nothing to do with why I stopped,” he said. His smile was out of focus but the way his dry lips touched Malik’s was in hyper focus. “It will be much easier to remain inconspicuous in plain sight if you play along.”

Malik allowed himself to be pulled in to the store out of shock. Shaun let go of his hand when he rounded the corner to section of the store that supplied his entire wardrobe. For a moment it was possible to forget Altair was out risking his life for a traitor and Shaun was leading them along while offering limited information. Desmond-was-missing and Rebecca-was-gone and there was Shaun cooing over sweaters and button down shirts.

“I don’t know if I trust you,” Malik said.

Shaun dug through the T-shirts until he found something that wasn’t offensively bright and went through the jeans until he found a pair he liked. “At this point, I am the only person you should trust. My unwillingness to be a pawn in your revenge against him for loving you, aside, I’ve done nothing to cause you not to trust me.”

Malik frowned while Shaun held shirts up in front of his chest and rejected them one after another. “You have secrets you aren’t telling.”

“I will tell you anything you ask if we survive this mission, Malik.” After a pause he found a blue shirt he seemed to like and then a new jacket with a zipper in the front and a white-etched design in the back that looked almost like a bird. 

When Shaun straightened up from digging through a pile of bargain clothes, Malik slipped an arm around his back and pressed his other hand against his chest. The hard straps of the hidden blade pinched his arm under the long sleeves of his jacket and the blunt edge of it must have been pressing a dent into Shaun’s skin. 

“I promise,” Shaun said. And it, at least, was true.

\--

They changed their clothes in the bathroom and Shaun stuffed the things they had been wearing into a trash can. He took his glasses back from Malik long enough to flip through several screens on his phone and frown at them. For a moment he looked indecisive about what to do next and then he typed a message and sent it to the phone that Desmond had. 

“If I had kissed you before Altair,” Malik said.

“I wouldn’t have stopped you. But you didn’t, did you?” Shaun flipped through a few more screens before he got a reply and was all-gentle-smiles as he answered whatever Desmond said and then tucked his phone back into his pocket. “Do you want to get something to eat before we start walking?”

“Yes,” Malik said. It had been hours since breakfast and hours more until he expected to be able to eat. 

\--

They crossed the city on a series of sidewalks, talked about nothing but what direction to take and the chill in the air when a cluster of cars passed them. Shaun carried his bag across his body and checked his phone now-and-again when they reached a crosswalk that required them to wait. 

\--

The unfinished office building was abandoned-for-the-night when they reached it. The contractor’s office was empty and the lot was dim. There were a number of signs prohibiting them from entering and a chain link fence that was easy enough to go over (even for Shaun). The walls were standing on the outside but the interior (when Malik broke the lock) was unfinished. The stairs were in place but the walls were incomplete. 

“Up,” Shaun said. 

Malik followed him up-and-up-and-up and around to the side of the building that faced the hotel. In the dark space by the window there was a long black case, four sleeping bags and a lantern. Shaun dragged the case away from the window and picked up the lantern to take it over so he could see the rifle when he opened the case.

“That is nice,” he said. His fingers ran across it and then he snapped the case shut again. “Now we wait.”

\--

Altair came after dark, creeping slowly across the lot with Lucy at his side. She was first on the stairs and first to come into the room. There was a sling across her body that her right arm must have been meant to be in. There was a blood spot on her shirt where he’d shot her and a distinct pinched look of pain in her face.

Shaun stood up when he saw. His arms were half-raised as if he meant to hug her but she side stepped the motion and crouched in front of the rifle case to pop it open and look at the gun inside. Her fingers were reverent in their touch the way Shaun’s had been but purely efficient as she picked up the individual pieces and checked them. 

“Thank you for saving my life, Shaun. No problem at all, Lucy, my pleasure as always.” Shaun dropped his arms at his sides and turned on his heels to look at her. Altair was behind his back making a confused-and-frustrated face at the new clothes before he noticed Malik’s new jacket and his confusion turned to outright dislike. 

“You called William,” Lucy said as she stood up. Her right arm was lagging at her side but her left hand fit tight against her hip as she leaned her body forward aggressively. “Or did you make Desmond do it? Because I’m sure that was a phone call he was excited to make for you.”

“I think you’re forgetting how drastically we are outnumbered in this situation. Let us count how many there are of _us_ and then count how many there are of _them_.” Shaun made a theatrical spectacle of counting the four of them in the room and then motioning out toward the hotel. “Thomas Grand has to die.”

“You better hope you don’t miss because we’re all dead if you do,” Lucy hissed at him.

“I wouldn’t be here if I _missed_ ,” Shaun snapped back. He threw his hands up at Lucy who turned her back on him and stared hatefully at her own feet. Shaun went back to the sleeping bag he’d set up as a nest to sleep in and Lucy grabbed a sleeping bag for herself and sat on it just outside the shallow puddle of dim light. 

Altair came over to him, stood at the edge of where Malik had spread two of the sleeping bags out together. His expression was questioning and then contemplative and then he bent forward to take his shoes off and sat next to him. “Nice shirt,” he said.

“He got you one too,” Malik said back. He smacked Altair in the face with the shirt and enjoyed the offended shock on his face. “Don’t be a child,” Malik said. Altair gave him a look before he tucked the new shirt into the sleeping bag and made a show out of preparing himself to rest.

\--

They took turns staying awake to watch for an oncoming swarm of Templars. Shaun-and-then Altair and Malik when the sun was creeping up in the sky turning the distant horizon a pinkish-sort of purple. Lucy was awake with him, sitting near the window where she could see but not be seen from the hotel. The blood had grown from a spot to a broad circle on her shoulder and her arm was back in the sling. 

“You tried to cut your arm off,” Lucy said. The sound of her voice was sudden, like the words she had chosen to start a conversation. At first she did not look away from the window. “There should a scar across the front of your left bicep. You killed one of the guards that brought you food and you took the keys he had in his pocket. I found you sitting next to his body with the end of his belt in your clenched teeth as you sawed at your arm. There was blood everywhere—all over your arms and your face and your hand. When you saw me you started shouting in Arabic, the same thing over and over again.”

Malik lifted the short sleeve of his T-shirt to show the broad-pink scar on his arm above the thinner ones he remembered getting. The skin was too-smooth now and thicker in the center. “What was I saying?”

“My brother is dead,” Lucy said. She looked at him then. “You may never believe me, Malik, but I never intended for Altair to be caught and even if I hurt you—and I know I did—it was not anything I wanted to do.” Then she looked back out the window. 

\--

Malik woke Shaun up just after dawn. Shaun assembled the rifle and positioned it by the window that gave him the clearest view of Thomas Grand’s window. His phone rang at seven-thirty-six and he answered it as he looked through the rifle. 

“I’m ready,” he said. After a moment he hung up the phone and set it down out of the way. “Rebecca is in, Desmond has Thomas Grand’s number. One of you needs to go down and be the bait that makes that bastard show his face at the window.” He lifted his head long enough to say, “not you, Lucy.”

Altair was opening his mouth to volunteer but Malik stood up before he had the chance. “I’ll go.” He pulled his jacket back on and zipped it up his chest. His heart was racing hard as he made sure his shoes were tied comfortably and then moved to go. Altair caught him by the hand and pulled him back up against his body. His intention was clear-as-day and Malik didn’t even offer the most meager of protests when Altair kissed him. The desperate worry in the touch of Altair’s hands on his face and wrist was enough to make him relax into the embrace and press back into the kiss. 

Malik-had-no-idea what he wanted or what was going to happen but he wasn’t heartless enough to deny Altair what he knew he wanted now. They were at the whim of men who lived in a world wholly different than their own. He pulled away first and Altair said, “safety and peace,” like _come back to me_.

“Safety and peace,” Malik said. Then he turned away and started down the stairs.


	9. Chapter 9

“Lucy, do be a dear and plot our escape in the very likely event this goes south.” Shaun was sitting like a statue with his face hidden by the rifle. His voice was steady-and-smooth, unaffected and disconnected from any emotion that he might otherwise have expressed. He did not even motion toward the collection of phones and other handheld devices with permanent internet access but Lucy found them and started running her thumb across their screens in a rapid-blink-succession. 

“What kind of percentage of success are you hoping for here?” Lucy asked.

“I’ll take anything greater than fifteen percent,” Shaun said, “priority is given to the two ReCarns and one driver. Anyone else we manage to extract is a bonus.” 

“Right,” Lucy said. She turned her attention back to the phones and after a moment tossed them down where she’d picked them up. Her hands seized at the air as if she meant to grab a weapon that she did not have. “Altair—with me. We need a car.” She bent to pull an old phone out of Shaun’s bag and flipped the flap of it open and dug around inside until she found a gun and small knife. “Time frame?” Lucy asked.

“Twenty or less,” Shaun said.

Then Lucy pulled the sling off and tossed it to the ground. The blood spot on her shirt was a glaring aberration and she frowned at it before she bent to take the shirt that Malik had slapped him in the face with the night before. It was large on Lucy but it covered the blood and afforded her a token more anonymity. “You remember your promise?” Lucy said to him when they were running down the stairs.

“I do,” Altair assured her. 

\--

They ran through the early-morning traffic toward a corner lot convenience store with a blind corner and a wealth of easy cars. It didn’t even need to be hot-wired because the keys were still inside of it. Lucy slid into the driver’s seat and eased out into traffic, heading down and away from the building they were meant to be at. 

“What happens if you get caught?” Altair asked. 

“I get tortured for information. My cover is blown to shit. Abstergo thinks I’m an assassin and the Assassins think I’m a Templar. Either way, my death will be long and painful. The things I know? Neither side needs that much information.” She did a sharp turn into a company parking lot, parked by a different car. “I would have liked something bigger,” she said to the four-door. But the doors weren’t locked in the back and it had a full gas tank. Altair watched out the windows for anyone coming while she hot-wired it.

“Did you know that you’d never be free when you started?” Altair asked. They were back in traffic and the immense unknowing was making his body vibrate. Somewhere-out-there Malik was playing bait for men with guns and there was nobody to protect him but a little boy playacting as a real assassin. Altair couldn’t-see and couldn’t-hear him and had no way of reaching him if something happened.

“No,” Lucy said, “that part was kind of gradual realization. But, I mean—it was your whole life, wasn’t it? I used to make myself promises, like: just a few more weeks and then you can walk away or just get through this assignment and they’ll get you out. Or you’re doing this for the greater good—one day they’ll know the truth. But those promises never come true so you start rationalizing how you’re just one life versus a whole planet full of people that need saving. Feeling noble and heroic is enough to get by on for a while until the pressure starts to break you down and what’s left then? I started to enjoy what I did, I started to understand Abstergo and everything they did. I could feel everything I believed in slipping away from me and I kept telling himself that I was just playing a part. But how long can you really lie to yourself like that?”

“In my experience, people are capable of doing anything they must do in order to survive,” Altair said. 

Lucy’s little breath was like a laugh. They made a turn back into the parking lot behind the half-finished office building and Lucy pulled out her phone and bit her lip. “I’m going to do everything I can to keep you and him alive,” Lucy said. Then she turned the phone over and looked out the mirror toward the hotel that was barely visible around the side of the building.

\--

Waiting was always the most difficult part. Malik had thrived in stillness, easily surpassed him with patience and his constant attentiveness. Altair had tried again-and-again to master the art of alert waiting but he had been distracted and dull time and time again. His body and mind had been honed to action and inaction made them soupy-and-slow. 

“Why do you love Malik?” Lucy asked. She wasn’t looking at him when she asked. He was slouched in his seat toying with the cuffs of his hoodie and trying to imagine how very-many ways this could go bad very quickly. (Trying to figure out if there were a way he could replace Malik with himself when he didn’t even know where the man was hiding right-that-minute.) “I mean, I can’t imagine that what I’ve seen of him is exactly his most charming side. He’s handsome enough.”

“There are many reasons I love him. I find him attractive, that is perhaps the easiest reason. I think he is intelligent and compassionate. I admire his ingenuity and his resiliency. I continue to be impressed by his tenacity and his ability to concentrate on mundane and tedious tasks. I love his wit. I love his loyalty. I love how he always leans into my touch. I love that he does not need anyone at his side. He has faced his own demons and made peace with them.” Altair shrugged and looked out through Lucy’s window once more. He could see nothing but her blonde hair cut short and the blue glint of the sky behind the rise of the hotel. 

“I suppose it helps that he’s fast and lethal,” Lucy said, “I could see you falling for a guy that could take out a crowd by himself.” She was still turning the phone over and over in her hands. 

“I could see you falling for a guy who can’t bring himself to justify killing,” Altair said.

Lucy’s lips turned up and she turned to look over her shoulder at him. “I think he can justify it. I just don’t think he can make peace with the fact that he can.” 

\--

The gunshot came after the conversation went dull-and-slow. Lucy was leaning back against her seat with her head rolled to one side and her right arm cradled in her left hand. Altair was sitting drowsy-and-dreary with his chin to his chest and his knees against the dashboard. 

But the sound of the shot, the shatter of glass and the damning silence that followed shook them both back into action. Lucy started the car and thumb a button on the phone before she brought it up to her face. It rang once-twice, “Silver four-door, coming from the south.” Then she hung up and hit a different button. Once-twice-three times and she said, “leg it, you’ve got thirty seconds.”

They went over a concrete abutment, across the dewy-wet grass and up-over another low concrete barrier that dumped them into the hotel parking lot. Lucy was scanning left-to-right as the doors of the hotel were being pulled open and confused-civilians were coming out and looking around for the source-of-that-sound. 

“Where the fuck are they?” Lucy demanded. She stopped with a skid just beneath the shattered window. Altair was searching the parking lot and the mass of bodies one-side-to-the-other for anyone familiar. But there was nobody, just an odd assortment of unknown people with colors that started to bleed over his normal vision. 

Red there.

Blue there.

The door behind him was yanked open and Shaun threw himself into the back seat his bag across his chest. He was wheezing hard as he went flat in the seat. “I suggest we leave,” he said through the ragged pant of his breath.

“I can’t find them!” Lucy shouted at him.

“You won’t,” Shaun said, “get us out of here.” His arm was across his face and his bag was falling down into the floorboards. He was heaving for breath as Lucy hit the accelerator and shot them forward, over the slanted driveway and out into the street where a car honked at them for being stupid. “Fuck!” Shaun shouted. He kicked his foot against the door again-and-again. 

“What happened?” Altair demanded.

“How long do we have?” Lucy asked, “how much time do we have to get them back?” She was frantic between her attempts to look back at Shaun and the more pressing need to look forward at the road. 

“Twenty four hours at most,” Shaun said. He rolled onto his side and reached down for his bag. His hand was digging through the useless debris that he’d collected with his stupid frown making his pale-pink-spotted face look like a desperate mask. 

“Where are they?” Altair said again. There was a black anger in his gut that was clawing its way up to his throat. His voice felt like a snarl and sounded dead-and-empty. His hands were tight knots and the whole of his body was _shaking-just-shaking_ because if he moved an inch he was going to slaughter anyone that got in his way. 

“Assassins,” Shaun said. “That would be great, you might say, if not for how Thomas Grand has been telling everyone that will listen that Malik has turned against them. Everyone knows that Desmond was taken in by Abstergo and spit back out with Lucy-the-traitor-whore. Add these facts in with the assassination of Thomas Grand beloved Grand Master— Basically, barring the direct intervention of someone with greater reason the two of them will be swiftly executed for treason against the Creed. Twenty four hours is an optimistic estimation. Malik is less likely to start stabbing anything that moves if he thinks he has a chance of surviving through submission and he has to think about poor-innocent-Desmond.” Shaun pulled a phone out of his bag. “Lucy, find us somewhere busy to dump the car. Call William and tell him extracting Desmond and Malik is priority number one. He has enough influence that he should be able to stall them.”

“I’ll do it if you’re calling her,” Lucy said.

“Of course I am,” Shaun snapped.

\--

Altair paced the span of the sidewalk between the dentist’s office and the fast food establishment that proclaimed itself to be the very best in southern fried chicken. Shaun had put a considerable space between their bodies as he talked fast-and-sharp into the phone at his ear in a language that Altair could not understand. Lucy was hiding at his side, sitting on the curb with her head down and a stolen hat covering the obvious pale glint of her hair. Her elbows were sticking out from where they were resting on her knees. The phone she’d been cursing at for the better part of an hour was laying in the gritty dirt between her feet. 

“You’re making a scene,” Lucy said.

No-he-wasn’t because a scene was made of blood spread across dirty aisles between buildings. A scene was the shriek of women as they stumbled over the unblinking corpses of men with their guts ripped open and falling out. A scene was a war cry against those that stood opposed to him—those that were doomed to failure and death. Altair was not creating a scene but trying to temper the rage that filled his body with _fire_ until it burnt out everything that made sense in the world.

“Are they hurting him?” Altair asked.

Lucy’s head ducked, her voice went soft, “probably. They will want to know who shot their leader.”

But-Malik-could-take-it because they had been raised to withstand such pain. Malik had dragged himself home with his flesh torn and falling away from the bone. He had stumbled up the steps of Masyaf in a fury and still stood with his bloated-and-bleeding arm to shout at Altair’s incompetence. Pain was nothing that Malik had not been asked to withstand before or would be asked to withstand again.

He had gone still when Lucy moved. She stood without grace, her dead-shark-eyes sliding over to look at Shaun’s turned back. There was nothing trustworthy, nothing real, nothing at all in her face as she looked him right in the eyes. Her face was pale, upturned, her pulse was steady-and-sure. The heat of her body was a burden against his when her hand rested against his shoulder. 

She said, “these Americans are vengeful monsters, Altair. They’ll kill him the way they know he’s afraid to die.”

His hand on her throat surprised nobody (not even her) but the way she leaned into the violence of his touch was an unpleasant shock against his anger. She rose on her tip-toes and whispered in his ear exactly-how-to-find them. When she leaned away from him, she nodded at him and Altair shoved her so hard she fell over the curb and into the street.

“Shit!” she screamed.

Then Shaun’s voice was yelling at him, and chasing after him as he started running. 

\--

Altair had lived in this city for eighteen-years-of-Wren’s life. He had walked here and stood there and driven time-and-time again past this very same corner. It wasn’t finding the paths to take that taxed him but the time it took to transverse the distance on his feet. 

Every step was another moment that Malik was a prisoner in the hands of ignorant beasts. So he walked-faster-ran-harder and collapsed in bouts of exhaustion that left him shaking with his hands on his knees and his breath clotted in his throat.

\--

Altair found them in a rectangular building with the faded words ‘academy of dance’ still visible against the faded yellow stone. The parking lot had been broken part by weeds that grew as thick as a jungle from the cracked driveway to the boarded-over door. It was a wretched little hideout fit for only rats (how convenient). 

He went around it, found the door in the back and looked at it (like _looked_ at it) until he found the latch they’d hidden behind a deadbolt that slid out of the way. The door opened to show two men with guns jerking upright out of their chairs. A card table sat between them with a litter of tokens and two decks of cards that spilled to the side and landed on the floor.

Altair stepped into the building with his hands up. “My name is Altair Ibn-La’Ahad and you will take me to Malik Al-Sayf.” He meant to say the words in English but every-one-of-them came out in a flat tone of Arabic that sounded foreign even to him. The men in front of him were confused as the door shut behind him and the sudden dimness of the space with the sunlight blocked away disoriented them. It was not necessary (or advisable, really) to disarm them but he did it anyway. 

When they were groaning on the floor with broken bones and bloody faces he took the bullets from their guns and went down the narrow hallway. There was a trail of glowing-red along the floor, a bit of here and there on the wall that looked like the outstretched hands of someone desperate to be saved. It stopped at the corner that fed into three small rooms and one large room beyond a set of metal doors. 

Altair went to the metal doors first. The blood trail stopped there. He pressed his ear against the cool metal and listened for anything beyond it but the sound was muffled and hard to make out. There was a keypad at the side and several wires feeding into an alarm system over his head. 

“Hands up,” was a voice at his back. It was the presumption of his obedience that made him turn with his arms down at his sides. The assassin behind him had a gun aimed at his head but his resolve shook just a bit when he saw Altair’s face. “You want to see your friend?” the man said, “I’ll take you to him. Put your hands up.” 

“You will take me to him and I will not put my hands up,” Altair responded. The words were English this time, at least. He stood obedient and still as the man slid close enough to press the buttons on the keypad and the doors opened with a crank-and-snap. The room beyond was broad and dark, made up of little stations with glowing computer screens and blue-and-white electronic lights. The animus that Rebecca had used to resurrect him was sitting in one corner with a sheet across it and the many black boxes she had been so protective of were sitting in piles around it. 

There were faces that looked up at him with shock and some recognition and then there was partition made of light wood that did nothing to dampen or hide the sound of flesh-hitting-flesh just beyond. 

“Weapons,” the man said.

Altair considered himself civil (somewhat) so he stripped off his hidden blade and relinquished the knife he had been given. He dropped the bullets he had taken from the other men and obediently allowed a short woman with thick-hard arms to grope at his body to be sure he was not concealing any other weapons. 

The door opened and Altair stepped through it. He had been expecting damage. He had been expecting blood. He had been expecting to look at it with a keen eye and be unaffected in the face of a greater mission. 

He was not expecting Malik’s defiant-face in a deepening purple with blood in a wash down his throat to his bare chest. He wasn’t expecting the way they bound his hands behind his back or the merciless way they hit him when he could not defend himself. (But perhaps he had. He had done the very same not so very long ago.) 

“Henry,” the man with the gun shouted, “stop a minute.”

Altair walked over to where Malik was on his knees, bent forward with his forehead to the dirty ground and blood oozing out of his mouth. He was trying to catch his breath but he couldn’t because his body was shaking-too-hard and his diaphragm had been paralyzed (just for a matter of seconds) by a perfectly well aimed hit. It was a terrifying feeling and the fear had blanched Malik’s shoulders and turned his neck a brilliant red-color. 

Henry had-not been expecting to be attacked and Altair had not expected to attack him. It was simply, one moment he was looking down at Malik’s shivering-jerking body and the next he was breaking Henry’s nose, dislocating his shoulder and snapping three of his left fingers to angles they were not made to achieve. 

“Hey!” the man with the gun was shouting at him. 

Altair dropped Henry’s broken hand and kicked him forward toward the man with the gun. 

“You’re like what? Five days old or something? You have no idea what’s going on in the world today—what kinds of things we’ve been up against. Your friend there isn’t even your friend. The Grand Master told us all about him.”

Altair took two steps to put himself between Malik and the gun. “Where is Desmond Miles?”

Henry was picking himself up off the floor. He was big and angry but he stood back at the silent order of the man who outranked him. The wound of his pride was greater than the wounds of his body and it hung around his neck like a weight that pulled his body in toward Altair’s. 

“You don’t get to ask questions,” the man said. “I’m sorry that your friend is a traitor but I’m not going to let you interfere with our business.”

Malik was breathing again, at last, cheek against the cool floor. His knees were spread to allow his body to rest closer to the ground as he took a few grateful moments to appreciate the pains his body already experienced. 

“You will not touch him again,” Altair said. “Malik did not kill Thomas Grand. He was killed by Shaun Hasting with a sniper rifle that was provided by William Miles. Thomas Grand was identified as a Templar spy by several known Templars. If you attempt to touch Malik again before you have verified the information that I have given you I will kill every single person in this building.” 

Henry-the-brute was ready to start beating him, to smash him against the ground until the words he was speaking changed into something that fit the form of the lie Thomas Grand had been singing to them. But the man with the gun was sighing in doubt as he relaxed backward. The gun dropped and he motioned to Henry to step away from them. “Shaun Hastings,” he repeated.

“Yes,” Altair said.

“You make strange friends, Altair Ibn-La’Ahad.” He motioned at Henry to leave the room but snapped his fingers to bring four others in his place. They were not made of the same hulking mass of Henry but they were all scrapped raw by the death of a beloved leader and it showed in the bare-white of their teeth. “You let us move you somewhere more secure and I’ll consider looking into the information you gave me.”

“Malik stays with me,” Altair said. In another time, in any other place he would have been furious with himself for giving away such an obvious weakness. Now he felt nothing but a sense of peace—regardless of the outcome of this day, he would not be separated from Malik.

“Sure,” the man said. “You pick your girlfriend up and we take a little walk, nobody gets hurt.”

Altair reached down to pull Malik to his feet, put an arm around him to support his weight when it sagged heavily against him. They stumbled and the others closed around them like a protective shell guiding them back through the open room toward the metal doors and three rooms on the other side. 

“What’s your name,” Altair asked.

The man with the gun was behind him but nobody else even so much as glanced at him with an intent to answer. “Jacobi,” the man said. “Go in.” He hit a series of keys on a control panel by one of the three doors to open it. The light inside of the room flickered on to illuminate the small space fashioned like a crude prison cell. 

“Untie his hands,” Altair said. He shifted enough to look back at the doubtful expression on his captor’s face. “If you are right and we are traitors, you can starve us so we are too weak to fight back. If we are right and you do not untie his hands I will remove yours at the wrist.” 

“You’re not as likeable as the history books make you out to be,” Jacobi said to him.

“I am very likeable,” Altair countered. A woman came forward with keys for the cuffs that were binding Malik’s hands. “If I were not, I would not have given you time to see the error of your ways.” When Malik’s hands were free he shuffled them both forward through the door toward the dusty gray mattress in the corner.

\---&\---

The door slamming at their back was the note of finality—something akin to the bells that tolled across the city when Altair came slinking back to the bureau in Jerusalem stinking of blood and pride for the chaos that he had wrought. Except the man that stood in front of him now wasn’t the arrogant little bastard that had thrust a feather toward him with a defiant face just-daring-him to say-anything.

Malik wasn’t a Dai now, wasn’t imbued with any sense of power or authority but the whole of his body caught in one throbbing ache that centered somewhere around his chest and radiated out as far as his toes. When he moved, his body lurched off balance and his hands caught Altair’s jacket like the ineffective paws of a _dog_. But the flat of his palm was still effective enough when he slapped him. “You idiot.”

Altair stood straight as he slapped him, took the blows without flinching until Malik’s body was caving in on itself from the piercing pain that came with every landed strike. His anger tasted like his coppery-red-blood sticky and warm on his lips and clotted in his nose. It felt like a brand set into his bare skin deeper than fists could manage and Altair leaned forward and down against him. Altair’s arms were wrapping around his body, caging him into place and Malik dug his teeth into his collarbone through the layers of his jacket-and-shirt. But his jaw hurt and his teeth hurt and the smear of blood he left on Altair’s clothes had done nothing but prove how ultimately helpless he really was. 

“I will not lose you again,” Altair said as they sank downward. 

\--

Everything had happened in sudden thunderous storm of action. One moment they were standing idly by, hiding in a cluster of confused looking college students that were trying to figure out where to go for breakfast and in the next Malik was being dragged out into full view of the windows by the back of his collar. Desmond had found something steely-and-hard inside of himself as he stared up at the reflective surface of the window as he dangled Malik in front of Thomas Grand like wriggling bait on a hook. Malik had played his own unwilling part, keeping his hands behind his back to mock being restrained. He cursed Desmond for a traitor and a liar in low hisses. 

The men that took them were already out the door and running for them before Shaun found a clear enough shot. Desmond had shoved Malik backward, toward the fence that guarded the unfinished business as he shouted ‘run!’ but it was too late. They had traded their own safety for Thomas Grand’s life. Three men took Desmond with unnecessary force and another two chased him as he tried to run. The fight was brief and superficial, they were deposited into the trunk of a car hardly big enough for one-not-two.

“Sorry,” had been Desmond’s voice in the dark of the trunk over the sound of the road underneath them and the radio blaring in the front of the car. His body was definite pressure against his, the shape of his chest and legs pushed so hard into Malik’s body that it was likely to leave marks. “Tell me what to do,” Desmond said quietly.

“Do?” Malik repeated.

“I’ve been kidnapped, I’ve been held against my will, I’ve been turned inside out and stuffed full of someone else but I haven’t been…tortured, I guess. That’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it? They think we’re traitors.”

“Ah,” Malik said. He thought of his childhood, he thought of the years-of-training that he’d endured. He thought of the boy he had once been and how he might have laid in this trunk and wondered those very same things. His memories had the habit of coming in a fluid rush, overpowering and drowning him with intensity. But now, when he wanted them to take him, he could not remember a time that he had been afraid the way Desmond was. “Tell them what they ask. We are protecting nobody, we are serving no greater purpose. Tell them you were misled by Lucy and used by me.”

“They’re going to kill you if I tell them that,” Desmond said. His hands were cramped in the space underneath Malik’s body but his breath was a gentle little wet puff by his cheek. “I can’t just give them the reason they need to kill you, Malik.”

“They have reason enough,” Malik said. “You will tell them, sooner or later—you just have to decide how much pain you’re willing to endure.”

“If we survive this, remind me never to ask your advice again.” But the car was pulling to a stop and the sound of bodies moving made Desmond’s breath go light-and-tight. “Good luck.”

\--

Malik slept for a moment when his body gave out but he came back at the touch of a cold wet cloth against his face. The pain was worst in his ribs and his stomach where his body had been used poorly by a man with large fists and questionable vengeance. His face was a mess of blood from a single blow that had caused his nose and mouth to bleed. 

“You make a mess,” Altair said as he had said before when they were young. Malik had always bled freely and excessively when struck in the face in such a way that made Altair’s own blood seem to flow sluggish and resistant. 

“It’s a natural advantage, like longer legs,” Malik said back. It had saved him a great deal of pain in his time, as men prone to violence were easily satisfied with the sight of blood and unlikely to hit him again. He lay still a moment and let his face and neck be washed. It was comforting, in a way, to be looked after. There was the larger and more troubling matter of their captors and the vengeance they felt was rightful theirs. “They took Desmond somewhere else,” Malik said.

“Lucy is responsible for Desmond,” Altair said. He finished wiping away what he could get of the blood on Malik’s skin, then went to the small sink against the wall to rinse the cloth and brought it back again to start once more. “Shaun is determined to see us free, he is calling someone that he feels will have the power to do this.” The room was cool but Altair was warm-and-solid by his side. He had used his shirt as a rag and Malik reached up to put his palm across Altair’s chest where his heart was beating strong-steady-sure. 

“Do you believe in soul mates?” Malik asked. Altair was rubbing at the blood on his jaw now, trying to scrub it out of the scruff of several days without shaving. The many pains of his body were coming back in force, biting through the dull gray of sleep-and-the calm certainty Altair at his side brought.

“I believe in the possibility,” Altair said, “have we not seen enough in our lives to believe in every possibility? How is it that we came to be here? You were discovered by chance. You survived several deaths, a hundred circumstances led to you walking into that high school. How was Wren discovered? Why was I able to see you through his eyes even before the Animus brought me back?” Altair’s face was impassive as he spoke, singularly focused on the blood he was washing off Malik’s skin. His second hand was framing the space he was working on and his body had started to lean in against the fresh bruises on Malik’s side. “I held that boy down as he screamed in fear, I drown him in the mistakes of my past over and over until he was weak and tired. I cut through him, and he was powerless against me. It has not always been you, Malik. I have loved others in my life with as much passion and as much devotion as I have loved you. But you were the first and the one who has given me the most reasons not to love you and yet, the love remains.”

Malik-considered-this the way he had in the lifetime before when he stood in shock that Altair had married Maria-of-all-people. There was nothing about Maria that Malik had disliked or even disapproved of but he had felt betrayed (at first) and it had quickly bled into a surly sort of shock that had turned his tongue to acid and his every word to a pointed barb. His generous congratulations had come later when the shock had settled into something more steady and sure. (After Altair had come to him like a scolded dog and asked so very quietly why he disapproved.)

“Did you believe Abbas when he said I betrayed you?” Malik asked. It had been a question in his mind once, something that had not haunted him long in the aftermath of his brief rescue. Altair had-not-been himself when he retrieved Malik and tucked him away in momentary safety.

Oh-and-that expression on Altair’s face, the guilt and the pain that twisted and _hurt_. He cleared his throat before he said, “I doubted, yes. I doubted you in my own hurt. Maria did not. I feel I owe you such a debt that it can never be repaid, Malik. I have hurt you in a hundred different ways and have nothing to offer but an apology. What worth does a single apology have against the wounds I have inflicted?”

Malik laughed and Altair jerked away from him like he’d been hit. “You said yourself, the wounds you inflicted have not gone unanswered. Perhaps your transgressions have been spectacular but mine have been no less hurtful. If we are soul mates we are a poor set.”

Altair nodded at that and set the rag he’d been cleaning the blood away with to the side. “We are evenly matched, at least. You are as vicious and spiteful as I am violent and prideful. This world will regret the day it brought us back from the dead.” 

Malik kissed Altair then—kissed the dark twist in his voice, the vengeance in his face, the white-hot violence that curled into his chest and arms. The pain of his body was acute when he sat up to grab at Altair and it did nothing but make his hands dig in tighter because he-was-alive and there-would-be such a _reckoning_ for the things that had been done. Altair pushed him flat as he crawled over him, spread his legs across Malik’s lap before he settled in low against him. They were rubbing skin-on-skin with a raw scrap of their pants dragging together like sandpaper scratches. 

There was no tenderness in the touch, no sweet-and-gentle move in the way Altair kissed him hard and licked at the taste of blood in his sore mouth. Malik granted no kindness in the grip and scratch of his hands on Altair’s smooth back. When Altair reached between them to unfasten their pants he did not object but bite at his neck with hard nips and red-hot kisses that left red-wet marks. Altair’s voice was a deep groan as his hand worked with impatience until their pants were caught down at their thighs. They were rutting animals caught in a brief-heightened state of need. It was Altair’s hand gripping them together as they moved. 

“Oh,” Altair said in a gasp when his orgasm took him by surprise and Malik after him with, “ow” as his fresh bruises were abused to a point of pain he couldn’t not ignore even now. Altair kissed him again, framed his face with his shivering hands. 

\--

They were provided with dinner—two sandwiches on stale bread and a single apple to share between the two of them. Altair paced while he ate, Malik sat with his back against the cool wall to ease the ache in his ribs. 

There was nothing now but the waiting. 

Altair gave him the apple and told him to eat it and Malik was too tired-and-too-sore to fight him outright so he ate half of it. “I’m full,” he said and held the apple back out toward Altair. Hunger won out over nobility (as it often did) and Altair paced as he ate the apple. Malik closed his eyes with his head back against the wall and searched through his memories for something to drag the white edge of pain away and give him enough clarity to focus. 

“How old were you when you first wanted me?” Malik asked.

“Fourteen,” Altair said. He did not pause in his pacing as he spoke.

Malik snorted at that, “at fourteen I was still taller than you and you were no bigger than a twig.”

“As I recall you were also frequently covered in embarrassing red pimples and mocked extensively for playing nursemaid for your kid brother. It was after you’d lost most of the fat from your childhood, that I remember. You were darker then than you are now because you spent so many hours outside training with swords. I used to watch you when I could.”

“This explains your sunburnt face,” Malik said. “But I cannot imagine it explains why you would find me attractive.”

Altair stopped long enough to shrug his shoulders. “I should not be held responsible for the whims of my body. No more than you should be held responsible for yours. As I recall, you were once very attracted to—”

“Do not bring her up. What she lacked in physical beauty she made up for with other qualities.” But she had been unfortunate in the face and body, and Malik had spent months ignoring the many hurtful comments. He had thought he was made of something strong, something powerful as he ignored the words that were slung at him but he was nothing in the face of her generosity even as the men sneered at her face and called her a pig. When they finally drove her away from Masyaf, Malik had broken his knuckles tearing through her tormentors. 

“She did. What you lack in other qualities you make up for with physical attractiveness,” Altair said. He was grinning as he said it, turning away from Malik to hide how clever he found himself. They lapsed into silence as Altair paced again and the barb went unanswered.

\--

Malik startled awake when his body slipped against the wall and the motion reawakened the pain in his chest. Altair was running at the walls, teaching this new body of his how to not to balk at the instinctual fear of falling. His attempts at going up the wall far enough to flip backwards were laughable. Wren’s body simply did not possess the will to trust Altair could do it. But Altair did not stop, but run again and again and make it only a few steps or no steps at all before he lost his balance and had to catch himself from falling on his face.

It was soothing to watch, entertaining enough that he did not have to think about anything but simply float along. Altair kept at it for most of an hour before he stopped, stooped forward with his hands against his knees and his face gone all red from the effort. “You look better,” Altair said. “The swelling is down.”

“Then I need not refrain from telling you how ridiculous you look at the moment.” 

Altair smiled (quite possibly the stupidest expression his face could make). “Indeed you do not.”

“Come rest,” Malik said, “I’ll watch the door.”

\--

They did not talk of the obvious, unknown things. They did not talk about these Assassins that kept them in a cage as they tried to sort through the information they had been given. They did not talk about their abysmal chances of survival should Shaun fail at his attempt to rescue them. They did not talk about the havoc they would wreck when they were set loose from this brief captivity. 

Malik stroked his fingers through Altair’s short brown hair as Altair pretended to sleep. “Tell me about my son,” he said. Because he had not been given the opportunity to watch his child grow into a man, had not known the person that he became. He had not seen Tazim in his living moments but recalled him dimly as a little boy.

“He was very much like you,” Altair said. “Loyal, strong, moral. He was kinder than you, and less handsome—he looked too much like his mother. He had the power to guide people, and the will to see things done right no matter how long or how hard the task he was given. You would have been proud of him—I told him as much. He asked me about you, of course. I told him only the best things I could think of. You had grandsons, and a beautiful granddaughter.”

“Was he happy?” Malik asked.

“He was.” 

\--

The end came like the dawn that must have been rising somewhere in the unseen sky. All of the lights had been turned off in the room at some point and had only just a few moments ago come back on. The light had woken Altair who had slept at his side in a hunched forward ball of limbs and nervous-fists. But it was the sound of the locks moving that snapped Malik out of sleep with the force of a gallon of icy-cold water. Altair was on his feet first but Malik was at his heels in a matter of half-seconds. 

When the door opened, there was the distant sound of buzzing and the indistinguishable noise of many voices all falling into a busy grovel. The lights from outside were brighter (too long with too little light) and the suddenness of the blinding white light made the both of them squint into the open door.

The silhouette of a body slowly came into painful focus. Malik had spent countless long hours of his life in careful confinement daydreaming about the way he would exact his nonspecific revenge on the men-and-women around him. Abbas had been the easiest to hate but the second had always been Rosario. Rosario who stared down at him from her unusual height; Rosario who sneered at his meager attempts to acclimate to this world. Rosario who wrapped herself around Abbas with a shameless devotion to a worthless man. 

“It seems we find ourselves in quite a precarious circumstance,” Rosario-in-the-living-flesh said. She was smiling at him smugly, her voice a thick tumble of accent-over-English. At her back the brave-faced Americans with their guns and meaty fists were sullen and submissive. There was a litter of Italian Assassins mixed in among them, dressed in formal robes that nobody (not anyone) wore anymore. 

“If you have come to kill me I will not go quietly,” Malik said.

Rosario laughed and Altair’s entire body seemed to contract to a point of rage. She looked at him with a bright-curiosity, not unlike the way she had stared at him like the most fascinating science experiment. “You will come along,” she said to him, “I have someone very dear to you and I imagine that you’ll do what you must to make sure he doesn’t suffer more than he must.” She motioned her hand at her goons and they swarmed in through the door. “Of course, if you don’t care about Shaun, you are free to fight.”

Altair was willing-and-ready to tear through the bodies that stood between them and the door. Rosario was just watching them to see what they would do. Her body was strategically placed at the threshold; even if they attempted to fight she had time to close the door and lock them inside with her best-and-brightest. It was more than that knowledge that made her face darken with swollen ego. (What was it Shaun had said to him, what was it that Rosario thought of him? Feeble. Rosario thought he was feeble.) 

Malik looked right back in her face as he reached up to put his hand against Altair’s bare arm. It wasn’t enough to make Altair relax but it was enough to pull him back from starting a fight they had no hope of winning. 

Rosario pouted, and sighed. “I had so hoped you would give me an excuse to kill you in transit.” Then she made a motion in the air and her men grabbed their arms and slipped dark-black-bags over their heads to block out the light. “Let’s go, we have quite a way to go still.”

As they were dragged out through the building, Rosario whistled.


	10. Chapter 10

“Throw them in the back,” was the command the woman gave when they reached the white van. Her tone was bitter-and-acidic layered over and over again with a hatred so deep it seemed to change the timbre of her voice. Malik was at his side with gritted teeth and squared shoulders, resisting the hands that pushed him toward the back of the van. The door was pulled open by one of the robed assassins and Altair was shoved forward so he could only crawl into the van or be bent across the narrow opening. He climbed in and Malik was shoved in behind him before the door was unceremoniously slapped shut.

The van started just after the sound of another door shutting rocked through the dim, hollow back. Malik was blinking away the spots in his vision from going from the bright light of day to the murky darkness of the windowless interior of the van. The light from the windshield was thin through a hang of black curtains.

“You can hit me when you wake up,” was Shaun’s voice somewhere at his shoulder and Altair jerked toward the sound of his voice but there was a pinprick at his arm and everything went hazy with startling speed. Malik’s voice in an outraged roar was the last sound he heard before his body went limp and his vision went black.

\--

They woke up somewhere _else_ , someplace far removed from Wren’s muggy-little hometown surrounded and now overtaken by Templars posing as people. The difference was in the lightness of the air, the coolness of the room and the disorienting barrage of sounds-and-lights all around him. He shoved himself up on his limp arms and tried to make sense of the glass-panels covering blinking-blue lights set in boxes that hummed-and-hummed until the noise was like something drilling through his brain. Altair staggered to his feet, felt his body as it tipped too far to the side but could do nothing to correct it before it crashed backward. There was a table behind him that caught him just below the shoulder blades and a chair that he knocked his elbow against. The table shuddered but didn’t tip and the chair fell backward, knocking him in the head with a sturdy-metal leg. 

He was sprawled out with his arms in the air and a blackening-tunnel in his vision. It felt like there was something thick going between his fingers as he grasped at nothing, and his body felt prickly-and-distant. Even the pain that should have been as bright and hot as a sunburst was a dull gray. 

“Ah, it lives,” Shaun said somewhere to the side. Everything was floating in-and-out of his vision, dancing back and forth between making sense and drowning out in white noise. Altair tried to roll back up to his feet and succeeded only in rolling onto his side and groping through the graying-tunnel of his vision toward the sound. 

A chair rolled into his vision, and Shaun’s practical-and-sturdy shoes were just beyond his grasping fingers. Altair looked up toward him, toward his face with a livid-purple bruise and his left arm wrapped in a thick-white cast from his wrist to just below his elbow. (Altair thought, he knew exactly what had happened to Shaun, knew exactly what his arm had felt like when it snapped beneath his hands.) 

“I do apologize. You had quite a violent reaction to the original sedative. It was fascinating, really except for the bit where you broke my arm and tried to climb the walls while you shouted about traitors in our midst. The second one we gave you is ever so slightly stronger.” Shaun didn’t move any closer to him, but he didn’t move farther away when Altair finally managed to roll onto his stomach and crawl a few precious inches forward. 

“Malik,” Altair finally managed to say. His tongue was dry and his voice sounded grated over sandpaper but Shaun understood it well enough anyway. 

Shaun leaned back into his chair so that it squealed in objection and shook his head in something like-amusement-or-disdain. “After your stunning display, Malik was moved down the hall to a more secure room. It was decided that our chances of survival—should you wake up out of your mind—increased greatly if we could bargain with you.”

Altair found himself laying on the floor again, cheek pressed against the cool surface and arms stretched out at his sides. Everything-was-heavy and his head hurt in a circling-sort-of-way. Shaun’s voice was fading out and in again, but Altair was just so _tired_ he didn’t even care.

\--

The room had gone dark before Altiar woke up again. There was no floor under his face but a soft pillow and the comforting warmth of slept-in sheets. His arms were spread out uselessly at his sides but firmly coiled around the comforting bulk of a known body at his side. He blinked at the dimness of the room, looked up toward the white light emanating from the tablet Malik was holding and lifted one hand up to touch his face.

Malik slapped him without saying a word. 

“Are we prisoners?” Altair asked. His tongue was fuzzy-and-huge in his mouth. He felt dried out and crispy everywhere but too lazy to do more than acknowledge the feeling and enjoy the way Malik felt against him. 

“I have been told we are guests. However, the door is locked and we are not permitted to leave so I would imagine we aren’t well-liked guests.” But he’d had the opportunity to shower and shave. His cheeks and jaw were smooth down to that little bit of hair he always neglected to remove. Altair’s fingers felt sluggish as they moved across Malik’s face and then up to the tips of his hair hanging over his ear. His thumb traced the round curve of Malik’s ear as his fingers uselessly carded through his hair. Malik lowered the tablet to look at him. “Have you satisfied yourself that I am real?”

“If I say no will you allow me to touch you until I am satisfied?” Altair asked. 

“No,” Malik said. 

Altair rolled onto his back and looked at the plain-white-ceiling and the plain-white-walls caught in the puddle of light from the tablet. He touched the cool plaster and ran his fingers along feeling for dents and scratches and found none. “Where is Shaun?”

“Hiding from us,” Malik said.

“I broke his arm,” Altair said (because he had, because he wanted Malik to know).

“You cannot take credit for that, you were out of your mind at the time.” But there was no disapproval in the reproach. “I bruised his face.”

\--

When the door opened, an unknown man stood there in street-clothes and beckoned them with an impatient motion of his hand and a few words in poor English layered so thickly with an Italian accent they were barely understandable. Malik went first and Altair followed at his back. 

The building they were in was new—smelled new, looked new, seemed to reek of money in a way only new things did. They were guided down though bright-white hallways to the room with the glass-panels hiding a wall of blue-blinking lights. (Servers, Shaun would have called them. Super computers, perhaps.)

There was a map projected onto a great screen that had not been hanging in place the last time Altair had been in the room. Lucy was standing in front of it with her short hair slicked back and a thick-black marker in her fist. Shaun was less than an arm’s length away from her, arguing about something (from the look on his face) and Rosario was sitting in the rolling chair watching them idly.

Rosario relaxed as if there was a pinch of pain somewhere in her body that she could never-quite-ease. It was an obvious weakness to show so easily and Altair stared at her posture and the lean of her shoulders to try to figure out exactly-where-the-pain started. Malik stabbed with two thick fingers him right over his left hip bone before Altair could figure it out on his own. 

Altair grunted in surprise and Rosario was on her feet in an instant, straightening her smart-looking suit jacket. Her height was as much a shock to him now as it had been in those few brief moments when they first met. She was as-tall-maybe-taller than he was.

“I’m not dead,” Malik said by way of greeting.

“Yes, well. I had hoped that Shaun was wrong about you and you would throw yourself uselessly against the Templars and die. We all have dreams we must give up,” Rosario said, “and unfortunate truths we must accept.” There was nothing approaching civility in the way Rosario looked at Malik but there _respect_ and it was worth a great deal more in the long run. “I’m not a Templar, for instance. I have never been one. I have no intention of being one. Lucy,” she motioned over to where Lucy stood and interrupted the quiet-heated argument about the map. “Is also not a Templar. She was sent in as a spy and abandoned until I found her and she has been helping me find the Templar bastards that have infiltrated the Assassin ranks.”

“And Shaun?” Malik asked.

“Shaun was recruited to work intelligence,” Rosario said. 

Altair looked at the map, the same one that the Apple had shown him the very-first day. Lucy had circled a few of the markers and Shaun and put X’s over one of them. The picture was a fuzzy-overlay on top of the map of the world-as-it-was right now but Altair would have recognized the map in his sleep. “What do the Templars want with the Apple?” Altair asked.

“They want to enslave mankind with it,” Rosario said. “Since Italy is the last known location of the Apple, it falls to my Brotherhood to make sure that doesn’t happen. The trouble is that we don’t know where Ezio hid it, and the only person we know for sure can access Ezio’s memories is not here.”

“You should let me go get him,” Lucy said.

“I’m not letting you go anywhere,” Rosario snapped. 

“Desmond,” Malik said needlessly. He sounded so aggravated by the notion of it. By the idea of anything. 

“Of course Desmond,” Shaun said.

Rosario picked up a file off the table and the sound of paper clips dragging across the desk top made Altair turn toward her. Malik was tense but didn’t move as she held the folders out toward him. His hands were lax at his side and it did nothing to hide the violence in his face as he stared at her in contempt. “This is a deal,” she said and held the folders out toward Altair instead. He took them from her but didn’t open them. “The two of you were separate calculated risks that we took. Lucy warned us that the Templars had identified Malik in London and we considered intervening before you were reincarnated—at the time the only other person that had successfully survived the ReCarn program was insane and being tortured by the Templars. We had Lucy on the inside to monitor their progress and learn the process.”

“Abbas was first,” Malik said.

“No,” Rosario said, “Abbas was reincarnated by us, the Assassins, when I found him and Rebecca copied the process the Templars created. He was the first of the Reincarnation Protocol. You were caught and reincarnated by _them_ first. As near as we can tell, you were only ever taken because they felt you would lead them to Altair. We rescued you and returned you to Italy where we could rehabilitate you into a human. It was the deal we made with Lucy when she agreed to go along with the plan. She would catch and reincarnate you only if we took care of you after.” Oh-every-word was absolute venom. Rosario was smiling at Malik’s growing anger like she enjoyed every-added-agitation. She didn’t look away from the darkening scowl on his face until her smile was coiled up at the edges and there was no more satisfaction to be had. “Altair, there was nothing that we could do to prevent your reincarnation. The list of men that were caught and tortured to death for resembling your portraits is too long. It would not stop until they finally had you—the only upside of so much senseless death is that when they were sure they’d found you at last the resulting noise was easy to track. Allowing them as close as they got was the risk we took to find Thomas Grand.”

“What is the deal?” Altair asked. Unlike Malik he did not have a personal hatred of Rosario and she received no great joy in telling him things he could have figured out on his own. 

“I am willing to let you go, to give you all the money you will need to survive wherever you go and new identities to allow you to travel with ease to whatever location you choose. I will even offer you protection in your new home until you are established and able to care for yourselves.” That did not seem like a trap (not very much) but it felt almost as if it were meant to be unappealing nonetheless. “I am not without compassion,” she said to Malik (not him), “for all that I hate you, I am aware that you have lived and fought this war once before. You are an old man and I was taught to respect my elders.” (Oh the hatred in her voice.) 

“Your offer is not respect. Your offer is a thinly veiled exile. You must think that we are the most ignorant men you have ever met to consider an offer that sends us out into the world with no ability to protect ourselves from the many varied people that want us dead.” Malik reached over and took the folders from his hand and threw them back at Rosario like they were sharpened-daggers meant to tear her intestines free from her body. The files hit her and fell to the floor in a great flutter of papers. Somewhere to the side, Shaun made a noise of protest that was cut off sharply by the impact of a fist against his chest. “Don’t insult me with lies, Rosario. That has gone on far too long.”

Rosario rolled her eyes and looked over at Shaun. “Talk sense to your pet, Shaun.”

“He’s not a pet,” Shaun said with less authority than Altair had ever heard him speak. “I rather think we should take a break from this rousing discussion of the future. You haven’t had much to eat since you woke up. You must be hungry, hmm?” Shaun was motioning toward the door but Malik had not stopped staring at Rosario even when she turned away from him with obvious dismissal. 

“Abbas was a worthless man that nearly drove the Assassins to extinction,” Altair said. “He murdered my son; he imprisoned my trusted advisor under false charges. He was a filthy dog, hungry for power and driven by his own private pursuit of glory. If he seduced you with promises of love they were only words meant to bend you to his will. What would have become of you when he no longer had any use for you?” Altair pushed past Shaun who had turned toward him with a pleading-sort-of-look. 

Rosario was looking right at him, close enough now that he could see the age like lines on her face. The sharp incline of her frown and the bitter hurt still fresh in her eyes. Oh-she-had-loved Abbas in a way that was more real and more permanent than Altair could even _imagine_. “I have heard many things about you, Altair Ibn-La’Ahad but I don’t recall hearing much about your cruelty.”

“Then you know nothing of me,” Altair snapped at her. He was-a-young-man, full of his own idiot-pride, built and bolstered on the false confidence that Al Mualim had poured into his ear for as long as he could remember. He was _invincible_ and she was _nothing_ to him. “Abbas was a thief and a coward.”

“The man you love is a bitter, violent pig,” Rosario snapped back at him.

Altair hit her and she hit him back. They were on the floor in a heap of limbs, landing blows that were meant to cause as much damage as they could without the force required for incapacitation. He was still-young and uninjured. She was hindered by the restrictive clothing she wore, the injury she had once sustained and the age that limited her endurance. He pinned her down in the end with a crowd of spectators at his back that had not made as much as a move to intervene. “We mourn those we lose,” he said to the tears of embarrassment, rage and hurt on her face. “So mourn the man you chose to love but do not threaten Malik again with your words or your eyes.” He shoved himself away from her.

Malik hit him when he stood up but he didn’t berate him for being so foolish as to be pulled into a fight that did not need fighting. He just turned and walked away from him, past the Assassins that were closing in around their Mentor with worried words in slippery-Italian. They were out in the hallway, around a corner before Malik shoved him against a wall and kissed him hard-and-hurtful.

“I don’t need you to protect me,” he said between rough kisses, when his breath was a wet gasp and his hands were needy fists pulling his clothes out of shape. Altair’s arms were around Malik’s body, pulling him as close as he could get him as he used his height to his advantage and had Malik hugging his body to keep from falling over with his head tipped back as far as it was. 

“Stop that,” Lucy snapped. 

“They really don’t need any more excuses to hate you right now,” Shaun hissed. He grabbed Malik and Lucy shoved Altair and they were walking-fast down the hallway. “It’s understandable you don’t know anything, Altair but Rosario is beloved and you have just made a fool of her.” He just kept pulling them down the hall until they found a room with tables and a series of coolers standing at the far end boasting a mountain of easily-heated food. “Eat. Stay here until I smooth this over, absolutely do not enrage anyone else.” Then Shaun was gone.

Lucy stayed, shaking her head and cradling her sore arm against her chest. 

\--

They ate cold sandwiches and salty bagged chips while Lucy stood guard between the table and the door. Altair said nothing, found himself lapsing into a muddy dull spot of thought and action while Malik went still and quiet. (There was no version of Malik more dangerous than this strange silent creature he became when he was angry.)

Shaun returned at-last, looking more ragged and harassed than he had ever managed before. His collared shirt was pulled loose from his pants and his sweater vest was pulled askew but there was no careful motion of his body to betray injury. He collapsed into a chair at the end of the table between Malik-and-him. “The Italians are furious,” Shaun said, “they feel that they went to America to rescue you, left their post with limited cover and therefore left all of their people vulnerable in their absence and the only gratitude you’ve managed to show is contempt and disdain.” Shaun motioned at Malik. “They mostly think you’re an asshole but they were raised on the legends of your greatness that pales only in comparison to Ezio Auditore himself. They also think you’re ungrateful but they’re more patient about it.”

“Why did they rescue us?” Malik asked.

Shaun folded forward and banged his head on the table so quickly it took a moment to realize it was an act of drama and not a sign of extreme fatigue. When he sat up straight again there was a round red spot in the center of his forehead that matched the blushing frustration that made his neck and cheeks rosy. “I realize it must be very hard for you to understand this, but nobody actually wants you to die, Malik. Most of us—in fact nearly all of us—have spent a goodly portion of our time keeping you alive. Yes, we’ve misled you and yes, we’ve had to make decisions that put your life in danger but we never intentionally set out to harm you. We have, in fact, worked very hard to the opposite effect.”

“You drugged me,” Malik said.

“Actually, Abstergo drugged you. Rosario started weaning you off the drugs as soon as they got you out but the dose they had you on to contain your psychotic outbursts was at near lethal limits. The process took a long time, especially when you started reacting so negatively to lowered doses.” Lucy was still standing guard, looking half over her shoulder when she spoke instead of turning her back to the door. 

“Abstergo didn’t drug me in the back of a white van,” Malik snapped.

Lucy made a face that clearly forgave him for being so fundamentally wrong about _everything_ but she didn’t bother objecting to the statement. Malik sneered at her with an uninhibited hatred (that made less sense _now_ than it had before, even if it wasn’t unexpected.) Shaun was rubbing his temples with his fingers.

“I will apologize to her,” Altair said.

Malik rolled his eyes but he did not protest. “I will not.”

\--

Shaun led him through the narrow-white hallways, up the stairs and around several bends until they came, at last, to a massive office space with expansive panel windows. Rosario sat at a white-table with her back to the door but a station of two guards hovering around her while they talked fast-and-smooth in Italian. 

They stopped only when Shaun politely interjected. His Italian was not the same caliber as his Arabic-and-English but it seemed to be passable. The two guards straightened up to their full heights and made no secret of their desire to protect their Mentor. Rosario turned in her chair and looked at him with somewhat less contempt than she had before. When she rose there was a tenderness to her left side that betrayed the source of her old injury. 

“I apologize for my rash behavior,” Altair said. “I should not have disgraced the memory of the man you cared for. I did not know him in this time and I had no right to say anything about the person that he was here, with you. I should not have attacked you.” (He must have been an older-wiser version of himself because some bitter-sullen little boy part of him was raging against the words and the very idea that he should apologize for _anything_.)

“Thank you,” Rosario said. “I am not entirely without blame. Perhaps, I should not show such disrespect to you or the man you care for.”

Oh-but Altair could apologize for the harm he’d cause but he would not rescind the warning that he’d offered. It must have shown on his face because her sincere smile shook in place and became something more resigned while still-genuine. “Where is Desmond? Malik and I will retrieve him.”

“Retrieving Desmond is more of a diplomatic measure than one that requires force,” Rosario said. She waved her hand at the problem as if it were nothing to her. “Given enough time and the right incentive, his father will release him to me. I simply have to phrase my request in a way that best appeals to William’s pride. He is in no danger in the meantime.” 

“Not to mention,” Shaun said, “we are in Italy and he is still in America.”

Perhaps he hadn’t expected it, or perhaps Altair had thought that there would be some definable feeling of being _elsewhere_ that would accompany waking up in a country totally removed from the one he fell asleep in. But the fact that he was now in Italy inverted his sense of balance for a matter of seconds. The vertigo made his knees feel weak and arms lift at his sides as if he could correct the sudden imbalance. 

“America is not the same battlefield,” Rosario said. “Here, Abstergo is searching for the lost pieces of Eden, attempting to coerce our people and picking random bodies from the street to reincarnate.”

“Or worse, to strap into the Animus to dig through their ancestor’s memories until they go insane.” Shaun was moving now, across the room to where the piece of paper lay across the desktop. Rosario’s guards were eying him with curious distrust but they did not move to stop him when he picked up a pen and made a correction. “Thanks to Lucy we now know where most of the reincarnation centers are.”

“When we have the men to spare, we will dispatch them to shut down the centers,” Rosario said. 

“What about your own Reincarnation Protocol?” Altair asked. Shaun had explained it to him in the first day. The Assassin Order was falling to pieces, lost to disorganization and falling morale. An idea had been born to bring back the great leaders of the past and use them to revitalize the Order. 

“There are many, like yourselves that find themselves caught in some in-between of this life and the one before. Our services are offered to those persons. Only a few elect to undergo the process and those select few are generally welcomed back into our ranks with ease.” It could-have-been another insult but Rosario simply shrugged and turned back to her paper. “I have to finish this,” she said, “I trust you understand the demands of being a Mentor.”

\---&\---

When he asked, Lucy showed him where the training center was. They had built it into the basement, lined it with thick walls and divided it into several different domains. Malik found the hand-to-hand-combat section. A ring had been set into the floor and lined with durable, soft mats that absorbed both impact and sound.

“Malik,” Aldo said. He was one of the youngest Assassins in Rosario’s Brotherhood. He was smaller than Malik but the many times they had sparred had proven that he was quick-and-strong. 

“Aldo,” he said. They were not friends, if only because Malik had never seen much of a point in making friends with people that were set on keeping him prisoner. Or perhaps because they had always felt foreign and flatly temporary to him before. His world was limited to the circles he made from his room to the training facility to his room to an assignment that Shaun must have convinced someone he was able to do. (And back again-to-his-room.) 

“Should we spar?” Aldo asked. 

Malik nodded and they took their places to start.

\--

Altair found him, after a time. Malik had moved on to practice throwing knives while Aldo watched him silently from the side. Originally, there had been the pretense of working on his own knife work but it had fallen to the side and he was simply watching Malik now. 

“You could be more efficient,” Altair said. “Throwing knives are not swords, Malik. You’re throwing them with too much force.”

There was sweat in his hair and sweat on his face and a pleasant-familiar burn in his body. He straightened up and wiped his face with the back of his wrist, “I admit I excel at close combat.” 

“You are not called the King of Swords without reason,” Altair said, “but that does not mean you cannot improve in other areas.” This-must-have been Altair-the-old and wise because he didn’t sound like or look like the man Malik remembered with the greatest detail. “Who are you?” he asked and nodded at Aldo.

“Aldo,” the boy said. “It is an honor to meet you.” 

“That remains to be seen,” Altair said. He retrieved the knives that Malik had thrown, handed half of them to him and kept the other half. “Speed and accuracy, Malik. This is where these knives are most useful.” Then he threw the knives with quick-flicks of his wrist and arm and motioned at how they had landed in vulnerable-but-deadly spots on the target. 

Malik tried to do the same and managed to land four of the five in spots nearly identical as Altair, taking only slightly longer to do it. But Altair was grinning at him with his smug superiority. “You will always be better at this,” Malik said, “perhaps we should limit our competitions to something we are evenly matched in.”

“Free run,” Aldo said. There was a brightness in his eyes that did nothing to hide how excited he was at the prospect. “My brothers and I could hide flags throughout the town. Whoever returns with the most of them is the winner.”

“An excellent idea,” Altair said.

“Unfair at this point,” Malik said, “you are a skinny high school boy and I have had many months to train. Perhaps after you’ve managed to acquire strength and endurance.” He poked Altair’s thin-ribs and enjoyed the offended-glare that he got in exchange. Aldo looked oddly caught between laughing-and-mortification and wisely said nothing. 

“How fair of you,” Altair said. It had been many, many years since Malik outmatched him in physical strength and speed. (Almost longer now than he could even remember.)

\--

Malik left Altair training in the basement with Aldo as his willing and eager spotter. He wove his way through the hallways of this strange new building until he found Rosario’s office at the top, resplendent in its simplicity. She was sitting behind her massive desk, looking out at the stretch of the anonymous city beneath them. He stopped a polite distance from her desk and waited for her to acknowledge that he had entered the room. (There was no way that she was truly ignorant that he had come, even if he had managed to enter silently, the hatred she held for him must have acted as some sort of alarm.) 

“I will accept no apology from you,” Rosario said. “I try not to deal in insincerity when I can avoid it.” She turned in her chair to look at him but did not offer him the basic respect of offering a seat or standing herself. No, she leaned back in her chair and looked up at him with her best attempt at neutrality. 

“Altair will not leave the Assassins as they are now,” Malik said. He had known it for a long time, ever since he saw the man in the living-flesh again. Even when Altair was nothing but a fresh wound, clinging to him outside in the dim night air he had known that his fate was sealed more firmly than it had been before. There was no hope of escaping this life, no hope of turning his back on this war.

Rosario tilted her head and ran her tongue across the lurid-pink of her lips. “And what of you?” she asked.

“For now, I will stay where he chooses to stay. He is not whole yet.” That was the simplest part. “So it follows that you and I will have to find a way to coexist peacefully.”

There was no peace in Rosario’s face, no forgiveness or even the most passing attempt to be accepting. But when she cleared her throat she said, “I heard you infiltrated a Templar held building in broad daylight while there were a number of civilian police officers on site and successfully retrieved Altair from custody without being caught. I admit that while I have never felt you were more than adequate during missions before _that_ I find that very impressive.” There a pause to allow the compliment (as thin as it was) settle between them. “I have a second proposal for you, different than the so-called ‘exile’ that you were already offered. I do not have the means to destroy the Templar’s reincarnation program while my primary goal is protecting the Apple.” Oh-her-face went all bright at the murder she must have seen in his eyes. “You may stay here as long as you like, you may train until you feel that you are ready, _if_ you devote yourself to stopping the Templars attempts at reincarnation.”

“And who would I work with?” Malik asked. But it almost didn’t matter, because he would have hunted down the bastards by himself if he had to.

Rosario laughed at that, like it was the most ridiculous of questions. “You have been very thorough at removing even the most strained feelings of friendship, Malik. I will not assign anyone with the task of working with you.” Here she put up her hand to stave off his objections (that sharp-as-knives just behind his teeth). “But, if you can convince them to go willingly, I will consider it.”

“Shaun will work with me.” But he shouldn’t-have-said-it. It was such a stupid thing to give her an obvious weakness, one that she could exploit to her own advantage.

“Are you so sure?” Rosario said, then she waved a hand at him in dismissal and turned back to staring out of the window at the city below.

\--

Malik went looking for Shaun but he found Altair in the halls—looking for him presumably—and went willingly (enough) back to their room. Altair was all-but-shivering with some cross between exertion and exhaustion by the time they reached the room. He lay across the bed with an endless ramble of revelations about his own body’s limitations. 

“It is all at once, less than, more than and equal to the things I feel I am capable of. This body is full of energy and strength totally unlike the one that I died in but is crippled with lack of training like the one I was once a young man in and is exactly the body that Wren has always had. It fills my head until it starts sloshing about and I can’t focus on anything except that everything about my own body is wrong.” He put one arm under his head to prop himself up far enough to look at Malik and watched him expectantly as he waited for an answer. (Perhaps for Malik to commiserate with him about the strangeness of the sensation.) When none came, Altair sat up with his legs over the side of the bed and his hands loosely wrapped around the edge of it. “Where have you been?”

“To speak to Rosario, to find a method of peaceful coexisting,” Malik said.

Altair looked impressed but cautious. 

“We have a mission. When you are strong enough, we are going to find the Abstergo labs that do this,” he motioned back and forth between their bodies, “and we are going to shut them down.”

“With her support?” Altair asked. 

“Her limited support. There are few, she says, that would be willing to work with _me_.” Because he had made no friends but only enemies in the time he had been here. That before he murdered a man they called their friend and insulted their Mentor openly. 

“Lucy will work with you,” Altair said. But it wasn’t a suggestion, simply the easiest way to announce Altair intended to recruit her to their cause regardless of what Malik thought-or-wanted. Whatever understand had passed between the two of them, Altair had an unwavering loyalty to the woman that was mind-boggling at _best_. “Do not make that face. She is a logical choice: she knows the labs, she knows the men and she is as fast and as strong as you are. The only objection you should have is that she would refuse to work with you because you harbor eternal grudges.”

“If that were true, you and I would not be friends,” Malik said. 

“I have no illusions that you’ve forgiven me for anything, Malik. You have the ability to forget for a great deal of time but you have never cultivated the ability to forgive.” He waved his hand in the air to brush the words away. “It doesn’t matter. Lucy is a logical choice. It would be foolish to ignore the experience she has.”

_It doesn’t matter_ , Altair said. Of course it did not. The whole of their previous lives did not matter—it was impossible to suppose that they mattered now hundreds of years later. That Altair had made a sport out of fighting him, or that Malik had spent years of his life trying to best him or that they both failed in their own spectacular ways in Soloman’s Temple—these things did not matter. It did not matter the joy that Malik felt when Altair was stripped of his rank and sent out like a petty little novice to prove himself. None of it matter now. Not the slow reconciliation, not the many long days of their friendship as they grew into old men, not Altair’s insistence at locking himself away with the Apple, not even the regretful-doubt that had been on his face the very last time Malik saw him before he died. 

Malik said nothing. Altair watched him the way one watched a deadly enemy before the alertness wore away to complacency and he laid back against the bed again. Malik watched him wiggle into some comfortable position to nap until he couldn’t stand the suffocating silence of the room.

\--

It was not difficult to find Shaun. The man had always been well hidden in the most obvious place: anywhere there was a computer. There were other ‘analysts,’ of course, other men and women that had as much technical skill as Shaun but none that were so consistently in one place. The others were dispatched to various locations, often sent on missions with field assassins but Shaun had-always-been _here_ , in Rosario’s home. (Wherever that home was, and it had often moved.)

Shaun turned in his chair as if he had simply been waiting for Malik to find him. The whole of his body looked ragged with exhaustion-and-pain where it was not stiffened and twisted with stress. The soft stretch of his new sweater and the crisp white collar of his clean shirt were the only bits of Shaun that weren’t overtaken by anger-and-frustration. “Unless this is very important, I’m currently busy. It’s not impossible to negotiate with an arrogant American prick but it’s very taxing on the nerves.”

There was no mistaking the flinch in Shaun’s body or the subtle way he shifted his weight so that he would be able to flee if necessary as Malik walked toward him. His tongue was a pink smear across his lips and the chair he was sitting on moved to protect his weaker-already-injured side. 

“Malik,” Shaun started to say.

Malik hugged him. It was an awkward-gesture at the very best of times, but with Shaun so stiff and unresponsive in his grasp it was akin to trying to comfort a column of stone. Shaun got to his feet gracelessly and thumped Malik across the back with the bulk of his cast.

“Sorry,” Shaun said to the wince that Malik couldn’t fight back. The bruises the brutish American had left on him were still livid marks on his ribs and stomach. “I forgot, I didn’t mean—”

“Shut up,” Malik said. He stepped back after a pause and watched Shaun looking very stiff and confused as he tried to correct his posture and recover from a spontaneous hug. The man had reacted better to being punched than he had to being hugged. “I owe you far more respect that I have ever offered. Please forgive me.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Shaun said. But then he shook his head and waved his hand off to the side, “no, sorry. I heard you. I just—never thought you would say that.” Then he was quiet a moment while he considered the words, the weight of his own injuries (thanks to Malik) and the whole of the time they had spent together. “You’re forgiven,” he said.

“Thank you,” Malik said. He looked at the screen behind Shaun—covered in blurry English words—and then at the man’s wan-gray face. “Will you be able to rest soon?”

“Ha! There is no such thing,” Shaun said. Then he nodded. “I just need to get Desmond safely delivered here. It shouldn’t take much more doing.” 

“Good luck,” Malik said. He turned to leave—because he was of no use now—and Shaun stood for a moment nodding and then sat back in his chair that squeaked and rolled across the floor with a bitter little mutter to himself about the work that still needed doing.

\--

It had not been his intention to find Lucy. It had not even been an idea caught somewhere in his mind. He was exhausted with social niceties and irritated by the rough drag apologies that felt as if they had been scoured out of his skin. Malik had gone to find something to eat in the common cafeteria, retrieved a hot plate of whatever was being served (something Italian, naturally) and retreated to the roof to sit with his feet hanging off the flat edge of the building. 

Lucy found him there. She was wearing a sling again and walked slowly as-if-drugged. When she sat next to him, it was a cautious distance but a fearless closeness. Her reactions were dulled and there was nothing-at-all to keep him from pushing her forward over the edge of the building. “I heard you’ve been apologizing,” she said. Even now, even when they were meant to be brothers, her eyes were dead-shark-eyes when she looked at him. 

“Not to you,” he said.

“I also heard you have been offered a mission.” Because Lucy-was-smart, and Lucy-was-quick and Lucy-was-a-professional spy. “Altair asked me to join him, to join _you_. I told him that you’d never trust me and that we’d accomplish nothing.” There she looked forward, between her own knees down at the sheer edge of the building that ended in a half-hearted attempt at landscaping over the ground that had been broken to build this monstrosity of a building. 

“You don’t deserve my trust,” Malik said. 

“I don’t want it,” Lucy said. “I owe you a debt. I have done so many awful things, Malik. Most of it—there’s nothing to be done about it. But you, there is still some chance that I can redeem myself from what I did to you. There is some chance I can redeem myself from what I did to Desmond. I won’t join you because I would endanger you—because you wouldn’t believe anything I said, because you wouldn’t trust me to watch your back. One day, I’ll find a way to ask your forgiveness.”

Malik snorted at that. He ignored the sour-unsurprised look on her face at the noise. “When we were boys, Altair was thirteen or so, I think, he knocked me into horse shit in front of several of the other boys. For one moment, he looked honestly apologetic but the boys laughed and so he laughed and he told me it would improve my smell.” (Lucy was listening with the most interestingly confused look on her face.) “When we were fifteen, he kicked me in the balls because I was going to win a sparring match. At sixteen he showered me with insults and hit me when he thought nobody would notice. At twenty, he broke my collarbone with the hilt of a sword and told me I was weak-willed and worthless. At twenty eight, he ignored my words of caution and attacked an enemy we were not sent to engage. My brother died in the resulting battle, my arm was badly injured and had to be amputated. He apologized to me—eventually.”

“I’ve seen this movie,” Lucy said. “I know you didn’t forgive him.”

“My brother’s death was not Altair’s fault, not any more than it was Kadar’s or mine. The loss of my arm was not Altair’s fault, not really. I did not forgive Altair because he apologized for the consequences but not the cause.”

Lucy took a moment to think that through. She looked out at the city below them and then cleared her throat and put her hand against the edge of the roof between them. She turned so her body was facing him but her leg was still hanging off the edge. “I’m not sorry that I did what I had to do, Malik. You and I are both alive because of what I did, I see no reason to apologize about that now.”

Malik smiled and Lucy flinched when she saw it. “Why should you? Altair favors you, and he does not often give up when he finds something he wants.” 

“Case in point,” Lucy said as she motioned at him. She stayed another moment and then crawled back up to her feet and left him to sit in the last of the fading sunlight.

\--

Altair wasn’t sleeping when Malik came back to their room. He was sitting on the bed with his back against the wall, hands against his bent knees and eyes facing intently forward toward the door. For the briefest of seconds, his attention did not falter from the space he was staring at (as if he had not even noticed Malik walked into the room) and then a smile spread on his face and he blinked his eyes until they saw Malik. 

Malik walked over to the bed, stopped with his legs bumping awkwardly against it—watched the gentle rise and fall of Altair’s chest as he leaned forward. Altair meant to say something, the way his lips were parting and the change in his breath meant there was something he had been thinking over-and-over again (waiting for Malik to show again). But Malik reached down to pull his shirt off over his head. 

“Malik,” Altair said quietly. Oh but he was breathless-and-pink when Malik stepped out of his shoes and pulled open the button of his pants. His hands were steady against his thighs but his tongue was across his lips with wet anticipation. There was a blush of heat across Malik’s body where Altair looked—at the warm tan of his skin (paler in this life than he remembered), at the youthful width of his shoulders, at the marks left by the man that hit him. Altair’s whole body was being pulled in toward him. 

“I did not forgive you. I did not ask you to forgive me. We are one and the same, Altair.” Malik said when he was all bare-skin. Altair was breathless when Malik put his knee on the bed and shuffled up to sit in his lap. He had expected the hands that touched him to be fiercely hot-and-possessive. He did not expect Altair’s touch to be cool and hesitant, to rest on his skin with such endearing uncertainty. “If you keep looking at me like I am going to hit you, I will hit you.”

“I am trying to find some version of myself that is capable of touching you without making a fool of itself,” Altair said.

Malik smiled. 

“Don’t call me a novice,” Altair said before Malik could even think to bother using the word. But he said it like an edge of violence in his throat and his hands tightened around Malik’s hips with a crushing-sort-of-confidence. He wasn’t a boy overwhelmed by the sudden manifestation of his favorite midnight dreams when he said it. He pushed Malik back so he fell along the bed and followed after him so their bodies were tight at the hips as Altair caught his wrists and pinned them to the bed over Malik’s head. “Why now?” he asked, “a week ago you told me it was too soon, that I didn’t know what I wanted—what has changed?”

Nothing had changed but something that felt like a raw wound in Malik’s chest. He felt alone, singular and out of place set against the whole of the world, save for this man (right here) and he _needed_ this in a way that he couldn’t have imagined even _wanting_ it a week ago. He might have said as much but Altair would have turned him away (even now, even as the hard length of his dick pressed against Malik through the thickness of his clothes). Malik-was-quick-and-clever with his tongue, (for the best and worst) and he knew all of Altair’s soft-places. 

Malik put his hands on Altair’s chest, one around his back to rest there. There was nothing he could have said that would have satisfied the doubt in Altair’s eyes, so he pulled him closer and kissed the frown that caught on his lips. They were slow-and-easy at first, Altair resistant to Malik’s sweet-and-inviting advances.

He did nothing to remove Altair’s clothes, stroked his body through the clingy-fabric of his shirt instead. Altair shifted closer after a pause, pressed into the kiss with the whole of his body and slowly relaxed out of the suspicious tension. “If you do this,” Altair said with his lips reddened and his voice gone strained, “you’ll never be rid of me.”

“Well, I’ve changed my mind then,” Malik said. But his hand was pushing its way into Altair’s pants as he leaned up to lick the taste of Altair’s pink-pant of surprise out of his mouth. Oh-and-then, Altair kissed him hard and deep, wrapped both of his arms around Malik’s body as he humped forward into Malik’s hand. 

\--

After dark, somewhere between peaceful sleep and aggravated alertness, Altair’s arm across his body got tight and his teeth were a bitter pinch at Malik’s left arm. His voice was low like the blackness of the dark room when he said, “you shouldn’t lie to me, Malik.” It wasn’t Altair-here-and-now but Altair the youngest Master Assassin _ever_. “I don’t like it.”

“Be satisfied with what you have,” Malik said back—distracted by sleep, unconcerned by the violence of Altair’s possessive grip on him. “I chose you. I will not leave you. You need nothing else for now.” He was heavy with sleep and Altair’s alertness was comforting in the way that had always annoyed him so desperately before. (Altair is here, we are safe, we may sleep now and know we are protected.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...i spent a good amount of time trying to figure out if this was the end of this story.


End file.
